TV FILMS OF THE WEEK

ORDINARY LOVE Sunday, Sky Cinema Premiere, 10.15pm

A long-married Northern Irish couple deal with the consequences of the wife being diagnosed with breast cancer. Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson are quietly terrific as Joan and Tom but it’s the gradual discovery that this is not the first time they’ve faced adversity that gives the film its power.

QUARTET Sunday, BBC1, 10.30pm

Dustin Hoffman has only directed one feature film in his entire career and, unexpectedly but wonderfully, it’s this thoroughly British tale of late life at a gloriously inviting retirement home for opera singers and musicians. Maggie Smith and Tom Courtenay lead a tunefully top-notch cast.

THE GO-BETWEEN Monday, Talking Pictures, 11pm

Summer, 1900, and an innocent young teenager becomes messenger boy between two lovers. But, alas, the lovely Marian – played by Julie Christie – is promised to another in this gorgeous-looking adaptation of an L.P. Hartley novel as much about class as it is love. Alan Bates, Edward Fox and Dominic Guard co-star.

BELLE Tuesday, Film 4, 6.55pm

Based on a true story, Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral raised in affluent 18th Century London by her father’s aristocratic uncle, Lord Mansfield. She has many privileges but the supposed stigmas of her birth will be difficult to shake off.

GLADIATOR Tuesday, 5*, 9pm

Ridley Scott has made many great films but this is one of his breathtaking best with that thrilling battlefield opening, Russell Crowe oozing muscular charisma in the central role and the great Oliver Reed making his very last performance. ‘Are you not entertained?’ thunders Maximus. No doubts on that score.

THE REWRITE Wednesday, Film 4, 4.30pm

That rare thing, a romcom for grown-ups, with Hugh Grant on top form as a washedup Hollywood screenwriter reduced to teaching at an upstate New York university and Marisa Tomei as the single mum desperate to take his course. Marc Lawrence writes and directs with wit, intelligence and cliché-wary charm.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS Thursday, ITV4, 11.10pm

Only Quentin Tarantino could deliver a film so uneven and yet so very watchable. Christoph Waltz is Oscar-winningly good as Colonel Hans Landa, the terrifying Jewhunting SS officer, Diane Kruger (left) and Brad Pitt as leader of the avenging, Nazi-hunting Americans. Certainly no shortage of things to discu discuss afterwards.

LADY L BIRD Friday, BBC2, 9pm

A delight from beginning to end with Saoirse R Ronan terrific as Chr Christine ‘Lady Bird’ MP McPherson, a wonderfully headstrong and creative teenager growing up on ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in Sacramento, California. Just as writer-director Greta Gerwig did. Touching and funny. Matthew Bond