SEVEN FILMS TO SEE THIS WEEK
Sunday, 12.25pm, Star Movies
Still Alice
Oscar-winning turn from Julianne Moore in 2014’s indie from Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, based on Lisa Genova’s bestselling 2007 novel of the same name. Moore stars as Alice Howland, a linguistics professor diagnosed with familial Alzheimer’s disease shortly after her 50th birthday. Alec Baldwin plays her husband, John, and Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish play her children as they try to cope with her illness.
Phantom Thread Monday, 8.45pm, OSN Movies First HD
Daniel Day-Lewis takes on supposedly his final role pre-retirement in this six-time Oscar-nominated period piece about a renowned London couturier who takes on a young waitress as his muse after falling in love at first sight. The actor collaborates again with director Paul Thomas Anderson for a second time following 2007’s There Will Be Blood, while Anderson reunites with composer and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood for their fourth film together.
Elian Tuesday, 4.45am, Sundance Channel
Irish documentary makers Tim Golden and Ross McDonnell tell the story of Elian Gonzalez, the fiveyear-old Cuban boy who became an unwitting pawn in America’s ongoing cold war with Cuba, when his mother drowned while trying to reach the United States with her son by boat. The little boy was picked up by American immigration, who placed him with relatives in Miami. The authorities wanted to give the child asylum, prompting a long legal tug-of-war with his father back in Cuba. He would eventually return to the Caribbean island, where he became a national hero and struck a friendship with president Fidel Castro as he grew up.
Fences Wednesday, 9.20am OSN Movies HD
More recent Oscar-nominated fare, this time from 2016 in the shape of this Denzel Washington directed and produced period drama, of which he is also the star. August Wilson adapts the screenplay from his own successful stage play, and Viola Davis was among the Oscar nominees for her role as the wife of also-nominated Washington’s refuse collector and former “negro league” baseball player (there were no black players in Major League Baseball until 1947). Neither won the Oscar, though they can take solace in the fact that they picked up the equivalent of Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress awards at the Golden Globes.
Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi Thursday, 10.50am, Sundance
In March 2013, a depressed university student disappeared from his accommodation at Rhode Island’s Brown University. The following month, he was identified as a key suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings inquiry. Neal Broffman’s film follows the incredible social-media witch-hunt for the misidentified Sunil Tripathi, fuelled by collective fear and herd mentality; the fake story being wrongly picked up by mainstream media; the death threats and abuse received by his family, and the eventual discovery of the student’s body on April 23, 2013 – four days after the correct suspects had been identified and caught. An abject warning of the dangers of the social-media age and, dare we say, “fake news”.
The Wolfpack Friday, 5.20pm, Sundance Channel
When documentarian Crystal Moselle spotted six strange-looking teenagers walking down the street in her Manhattan neighbourhood dressed as the cast of Reservoir Dogs, she probably didn’t realise quite what an unusual journey she was about to embark on. The Angulo brothers had been locked in their apartment by their overprotective father for 14 years, and their only connection with the outside world came from watching films, and re-enacting their favourite scenes. She tells their story in one of the most bizarrely disturbing, yet simultaneously heart-warming, documentaries you’re likely to see.
Galaxy Quest Saturday, 2pm, OSN Movies Comedy HD
Tim Robbins, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman lead the cast in this affectionate parody of the sci-fi genre – specifically Star Trek and the Trekkie phenomena. Our heroes are the stars of a now-defunkt sci-fi series, Galaxy Quest, who spend most of their lives, and earn most of their post-Galaxy Quest wages, visiting fan conventions and carrying out promo work across the US. When the cast are visited by real aliens who have seen the show and mistake it for a historical document, things start to get very strange as they are taken into space to help save their new friends from a brutal warlord.