Films of the week

THE BIG MOVIE

HIDDEN FIGURES

(2016) PG ● Saturday, 9pm, Ch4 ★★★★

This feel-good biographical drama celebrates three trailblazing black women working at Nasa during the crucial early 1960s period when the US was desperate to get a man into space, after the Soviets beat them to it with Yuri Gagarin’s 1961 orbital flight. It was a time of segregation in America, and the three brilliant women in question were hidden away in the ‘coloured computers’ section of Nasa’s Langley campus – until circumstances and complicated mathematics brought them to the forefront of US space exploration and innovation. Taraji P. Henson (above), Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae star as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson in a film that tells their inspirational stories with great warmth and charm.

CLASSIC FILM CHOICE

THE TRAIN

(1964) PG ●

Sunday, 3.50pm, BBC2 ★★★★ The true story of those who fought back when the Nazis stole priceless art from occupied France was recently told in The Monuments Men, but John Frankenheimer’s superior drama got there first.

Not only is it a gripping tale with nail-biting action, it also features an intense psychological frisson between its two male leads: Burt Lancaster’s French Resistance man, Paul Labiche, and his SS officer adversary, Colonel von Waldheim (Paul Scofield, above, with Lancaster). Labiche isn’t keen at first to risk his men’s lives on the dangerous task of stopping the train carrying art from Paris to Germany. Waldheim, however, has far clearer motives and a lethal determination to succeed – and Waldheim’s brutality is all the persuasion Labiche needs.