The Herald - The Herald Magazine
THIS WEEK’S BEST FILMS
MONDAY
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015) (Film4, 6.55pm)
“This isn’t a touching romantic story,” confides Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), the socially awkward high school student and narrator of Gomez-Rejon’s remarkable film. At the behest of his parents (Connie Britton, Nick Offerman), Greg visits estranged childhood friend Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke), who has been diagnosed with leukaemia. A faltering friendship takes root, to the delight of Rachel’s boozy mother. In order to impress his high school crush, Greg agrees to make a film for Rachel with his partner in creative crime, Earl (RJ Cyler). Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a beautifully judged rites-of-passage drama, that eschews mawkishness and emotional manipulation in favour of a richly detailed portrait of adolescent dreams in crisis.
Atomic Blonde (2017) (Film4, 9pm)
In 1989 Berlin, KGB agent Yuri Bakhtin shoots dead an MI6 agent on the snow-laden streets and steals a microfilm containing the names and locations of active field agents. MI6 chief Eric Gray (Toby Jones) and his gruff CIA counterpart Emmett Kurzfeld (John Goodman) pressgang elite British spy Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) to locate Bakhtin and retrieve the microfilm. Her contact in Berlin is renegade station chief David Percival (James McAvoy). Atomic Blonde is an action-packed spy caper hard-wired with 1980s nostalgia. Director John Leitch plays to his strengths as a stunt co-ordinator, pushing the cast to their physical limits with each exhilarating flurry of punches, kicks, tooth-shattering face plants and acrobatic tumbles.
TUESDAY The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) (Talking Pictures TV, 8.15pm)
Paul Dehn’s screenplay sticks pretty close to the source material in this excellent adaptation of John le Carre’s classic spy novel. Richard Burton is superb in the lead role of
Alec Leamas, a burnt-out British spy whose latest assignment ends in failure and who is given a stark choice – come in from the cold and take a desk job, or go on one final mission. Opting for the latter, he is sent into East Germany, where he must convince the enemy network he has resigned his post and wants to defect, thus gaining their trust and putting him in a perfect position to deliver false intelligence. However, along the way, Leamas starts to suspect he is nothing but a pawn in a much larger game.
Unsane (2018) (Film4, 9pm)
Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) has moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the barrage of text messages from a mentally unstable admirer called David Strine (Joshua Leonard). Always looking over her shoulder, Sawyer visits Highland Creek Behavioural Centre, which offers support to victims of stalking. She fills in a series of forms to complete her treatment then discovers that her hastily scrawled signature has condemned her to a living nightmare. As she queues for medication, Sawyer is horrified to discover that another nurse bears a spooky resemblance to David. Shot entirely on a smartphone, director Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is a hallucinogenic mind trip, which generates sparks of claustrophobia from the restricted screen framing and occasional blurring of images.
WEDNESDAY Watchmen (2009) (5STAR, 9pm)
At the height of the Cold War, former superheroes driven into retirement by public outcry are shocked by the murder of one of their number. As they face the possibility of a conspiracy to eliminate them, the world edges closer to the brink of nuclear war. This adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s comic-book series is pretty faithful, even if it does tinker with the finale. Man of Steel