The Player

The New Wave directors of the 1960s liked making films about film-making. There’s Godard’s and Truffaut’s

– but Fassbinder’s autobiographical 1971 effort is the most striking, charting the viperish infighting and sexual cruelty of a cast and crew ruled by a tyrannical, alcoholic young director.

Le Mépris Day for Night

Robert Altman’s 1992 satire, starring Tim Robbins, was the darkest self-portrait Hollywood had produced since

and is a sharp commentary on the wider avarice of the 1980s, too.

Boulevard,

Sunset

Spike Jonze’s 2002 film is about its own real-life screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman – played by Nicolas Cage – struggling to adapt a novel, by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), for the screen. It’s a dizzyingly self-referential exploration of the nature of storytelling that manages to be engrossing and funny, too.

The Orchid Thief

The “brash, expensive” eight-part crime drama ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic) has arrived on British screens a year after it appeared in the US and Italy, said Ed Cumming in The Independent. Based on a novel by Gomorrah writer Roberto Saviano, its grand ambition is to explore the global cocaine trade by focusing on the suppliers in Mexico, the buyers in Italy, and the middlemen operating out of New Orleans. Packed with spectacular set pieces, it’s “about as subtle as an elephant loading a dishwasher” – and it makes for “exuberant”, if “bleak”, entertainment for “long February nights”.