Film choice

A Good Year (2006) FILM4, 6.45PM ★★★

 Reuniting Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe for the first time since the Oscar-winning epic Gladiator, this syrupy but visually ravishing romcom is based on the novel by Peter Mayle. It follows the travails of a city trader who inherits a vineyard in Provence. It’s predictable stuff, but Marion Cotillard (as a local café owner) is, as ever, very watchable. Tom Hollander, Albert Finney and Freddie Highmore co-star.

Get Carter (1971) TCM, 9.00PM ★★★★★

 A revenge thriller starring a superb Michael Caine as Jack Carter, a London mobster who moves back to the North East to attend his brother’s funeral. Suspecting foul play, he discovers a trail of misdeed leading to a local loan-thug, played with menace by Terence Rigby. Brutal and gripping (and adapted from the 1969 novel Jack’s Return Home), this was one of the last great British films before the industry’s Seventies slump.

Green Zone (2010) ITV4, 11.15PM ★★★

 Bourne director Paul Greengrass is reunited with thoughtful hunk Matt Damon for this thriller set during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Damon plays an army officer, out of breath in a flak jacket, who is on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. He begins to suspect that there might not be any, and that his shady superiors (led by Greg Kinnear) might already know it. It’s a compelling blend of fact and fiction.