Pick of the week
Asteroid City
It’s a hard category to win, but Asteroid City may qualify as the most Wes Andersonny Wes Anderson film that has ever been Wes Andersonned. Ostensibly, this is a film about extraterrestrial contact at a junior stargazer convention in the mid-century American south-west. Except what we’re actually watching is a bunch of actors performing in a play about a junior stargazing competition. No wait – what we’re actually watching is a television documentary about the production of a play about the contest. Structurally knotty, brazenly quirky and boasting possibly the most impressive ensemble cast of the century, it may be hard to keep the full shape of Asteroid City in your head, but it’s a wild ride.
Friday 23 February, Sky Cinema Premiere
***
Full Time
Laure Calamy is probably best known to British audiences as office gossip Noémie in Call My Agent. With that in mind, she is nothing short of a total revelation in Éric Gravel’s 2021 drama. Calamy plays a newly single mother who teeters on the edge of nervous exhaustion as she ricochets around the city fulfilling a frenetic daily schedule to keep her head above the water. There’s work, there’s a general strike to navigate, there are children to keep happy, there’s a job interview to attend. Relentlessly naturalistic in tone, this is a masterful panic attack of a film.
Saturday 17 February, 9pm, BBC Four
***
Moonfall
Roland Emmerich has made a career out of terrorising the world. In Independence Day it was aliens. In The Day After Tomorrow it was an ice age. In 2012 it was variously earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and mega-tsunamis. However, these were mere warm-ups for the bananas Moonfall, in which Earth discovers that the moon is a) hollow, b) a military electromagnetic pulse device designed billions of years ago to fend off an alien swarm, and c) wildly off its orbit. There are few words to describe how relentlessly stupid Moonfall is – and that’s a compliment.
Saturday 17 February, 9.20pm, Channel 4
***
The Letter Writer
Not to be confused with the 2011 movie of the same name, this is the debut film by singer-songwriter Lalya Kaylif, whose script won an award at the 2015 Dubai international film festival. Set in 1960s Dubai, The Letter Writer is the story of a young Arab nationalist boy hired each summer to be a professional translator and letter writer. However, his days of torching British flags are turned upside down when he is hired to write letters to a beautiful English woman. Shades of Cyrano de Bergerac abound in a film exactly as sweet and sincere as you could hope for.
Monday 19 February, Prime Video
***
Official Secrets
Gavin Hood’s fact-based 2019 drama about Katharine Gun – the whistleblower who exposed an illegal US/UK spy network in the lead-up to the Iraq war – is a searing, angry film that grows and grows in urgency to the point where you’re left gasping for breath at the injustice of it all. Keira Knightley has never been better than as Gun, plus the film boasts stellar performances from Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith, Indira Varma and Rhys Ifans, among many others.
Wednesday 21 February, 11,20pm, BBC One
***
Castaway
A film that almost certainly couldn’t be made in its original form today,
Roeg’s 1986 movie Castaway has earned an odd reputation. At first, the plot – based on Lucy Irvine’s real-life tale of spending a year with a stranger on an isolated Pacific island – seems the thinnest possible excuse to show Amanda Donohoe (as Lucy) in a constant state of undress. And though the marketing really leaned into this (one poster was basically a giant painting of a bum), below the surface lies a curdled portrait of a desperate bully in Lucy’s cohabitee, Gerald, played by Oliver Reed.
Thursday 22 February, 10.15pm, Talking Pictures
***
Mea Culpa
Tyler Perry maintains a level of productivity that would kill most people – in the last 10 years alone he has directed 10 films and starred in another eight – but in Mea Culpa, he seems to have hit a feverish new high. A “crazy sexy thriller” (his words) about a criminal lawyer, played by Kelly Rowland, who embarks on a sexual odyssey with the potential murderer she has been hired to defend, this is a throwback to the erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s. Luckily, it is self-aware enough about its own silliness to succeed. Case in point: Rowland plays a woman called Mea. Amazing.
Friday 23 February, Netflix
***
