FILMS OF THE WEEK

THE BIG MOVIE

Birdman (2014) 15 Saturday, 10.30pm, BBC2 We first see Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton, above) floating in midair in his theatre dressing room – in just his underwear. An actor best-known for playing a superhero (a nod to Keaton’s stint as Batman), Riggan is attempting to reinvent himself as a serious actor with a meaty stage production of a Raymond Carver story. The camera is a fluid observer, restlessly stalking Riggan and company around the dusty old theatre and its cramped back rooms, stumbling across scenes of ego, embarrassment and, occasionally, empathy. In this blackly comic, surreal satire, Riggan might be seen levitating, practising telekinesis and even flying, but he’s also a believable, complex central character – a man struggling with his own identity and with his role as father to a troubled daughter (Emma Stone).

CLASSIC FILM CHOICE

The Diary Of Anne Frank (1959) U Saturday, 1.30pm, BBC2 The powerful and sad story of

Anne Frank receives the cinematic treatment, having first been adapted as a stage play. It was shot in black and white, and it’s easy to see why the cinematography and art direction won two of the film’s three Oscars. Cracks of light, and shadows cast at odd angles in the Amsterdam attic hideout of the Frank and Van Daan families, bring home the strangeness of their situation, which Anne innocently describes in her diary’s first pages: ‘It’s funny never to be able to go outdoors, never to breathe fresh air, never to run and shout and jump.’ There are long silences, and scenes that bring home the boredom the refugees face during their long confinement, but all eyes and ears are on Millie Perkins as Anne (above), who reads from her diary as the film’s narrator, and is the beating heart of her own all too brief story.