What to watch on Sky and free-to-air TV this week
There will never be a happy ending, but Recovery 29 (tonight, 8.30pm, Prime) gives voice to those still mourning and those still seeking justice and answers a decade after the disaster. The Pike River Recovery Agency is committed to safely re-entering the Pike River Mine drift and this new documentary shines a light on the small team at the heart of their work. The aim is to provide closure to families who lost brothers, fathers and sons that dark day.
Everyone’s favourite game show host returns to his dramatic roots in a new adaptation of
and, just like there’s a chance you’ll go home disappointed. The Larkins (Sunday, 8.30pm, TVNZ 1) stars Bradley Walsh as Pop Larkin, a father-of-six living his best life in the idyllic Kent countryside. The producers want to be clear it’s not a reboot of the 90s show, but a reinterpretation of the novels by H E Bates.
Nominated for six Oscars last year, Minari (Saturday, 8.30pm, Rialto) is a gentle, genuine and charming rural drama about an immigrant family doing their best to get a slice of the American dream.
After uplifting his family from their factory jobs in California, Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) has ambitions of becoming a farmer and growing Korean produce to provide for the expanding Asian American market.
It’s an astutely observed insight to the immigrant experience in 1980s United States, and a great movie about human beings being awesome.
Florian Habicht’s Spookers (Monday, November 1, 8.30pm, Ma¯ ori TV) is equal parts bizarre and brilliant. Found just off the southern motorway as you’re leaving Auckland, Spookers used to be a psychiatric hospital, now it’s a theme park where you go to get the wits scared out of you.
But the interesting story is the people who run this crazy fright fest. Habicht looks beneath the gruesome makeup and raggedy costumes to reveal the humanity and tightknit community that really haunts this haunted house.
The longest-running gag is the sound of a propeller engine you hear throughout Airplane! (Friday, 9.30pm,
Duke) instead of a jet engine, a joke I missed the first 50 times I watched it. But 41 years after the release of this iconic parody, not all the jokes stand up. There’s plenty of racist stuff that rightly wouldn’t fly today, but it’s still guaranteed to double you over multiple times. The hospital joke, his drinking problem, ‘‘Surely you can’t be serious’’ … I’m laughing just thinking about it.
In the middle of the night, three cars carry a police chief, prosecutor, doctor, driver, two murder suspects and a typist to search for a dead body. Unfortunately, the person who confessed to the crime is having trouble remembering where he buried the victim as he was drunk at the time. A Turkish film that won the Grand Prix Award (the runner-up prize) at Cannes 2011, Once Upon a Time In Anatolia (Sunday, 8.30pm, Ma¯ ori TV) is a beguiling police procedural that slowly untangles its complex narrative and is regarded by many as a masterpiece.
Truman Capote was 13 years younger and just 16 years old when he met Tennessee Williams, yet they formed a lifelong friendship. The intriguing parallels between their lives are explored in Truman and Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation (Monday, November 1, 8.30pm, Sky Arts). They were sometimes rivals, but always huge admirers of each other, and this intimate portrait of each artist is stitched together using rarely seen interviews, as well as diary entries and letters they wrote to each other voiced by Zachary Quinto (Williams) and Jim Parsons (Capote).