SEVEN FILMS TO SEE THIS WEEK
Young Guns Sunday, Paramount Channel, 3.50pm
Relive your youth (depending on your age) with Christopher Cain’s star-studded retelling of the Billy the Kid story. Emilio Estevez is Billy, with Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, among the other members of the titular gang of youthful vigilantesturned-renegades, while Terence Stamp and Jack Palance are among the older heavy hitters. Classic Western fare, but given a distinctly 1980s teen-movie sheen by Cain’s direction. Some historians have labelled the film the most historically accurate Billy the Kid movie of all time.
Phantom Thread Monday, OSN Movies First HD, 8.45pm
Daniel Day-Lewis takes on supposedly his final role pre-retirement in this six-time Oscar-nominated period piece about a renowned London couturier who takes on a young waitress as his muse after falling in love at first sight. Day-Lewis reunites with director Paul Thomas Anderson for a second collaboration following 2007’s There Will Be
Blood, while Anderson reunites with composer and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood for their fourth film collaboration.
Giraffada Tuesday, Sundance Channel, 7.55pm
Rani Massalha’s Giraffada is set in occupied Palestine’s only remaining zoo, where the male giraffe is killed one night in an air raid. In her grief, the female giraffe begins to slowly starve herself to death. Saleh Bakri’s Palestinian vet knows that the only place he can find a new companion for his devastated charge is in a Tel Aviv safari park, and with the help of an Israeli friend, a cunning plan is hatched to save the day.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout Wednesday, Streaming on OSN Box Office 1
Tom Cruise’s recent antics in Abu Dhabi, where the star spent a few days hurling himself out of a military plane 25,000 feet above the Abu Dhabi desert, finally comes to small screens this week. The film won’t win any prizes for intellectual merit – it’s more of the big action sequences, dubious Tom Cruise vs the world story lines and two-dimensional baddies we’ve come to expect, and perhaps even love, from the franchise, and when it comes to big, dumb action movies, few people do it better than the tried-and-tested actor/director partnership of Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie.
Reign of Fire Thursday, OSN Movies Action HD, 7.25pm
Dark British fantasy/horror in the vein of 28 Days Later, Rob Bowman’s film takes place in 2020 London, 20 years after a tunnelling team have inadvertently awoken slumbering dragons of yore. In the following two decades, dragons have scorched the earth to a cinder, and left the few remaining humans grouped together in scattered enclaves in medieval conditions. Christian Bale is the leader of one such group, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Matthew McConaughey and his team of American military “dragon slayers”.
23 Kilometres Friday, Sundance Channel, 2pm
On the road to Damascus in Lebanon’s beautiful Beqaa Valley, an Armenian man with late-stage Parkinson’s takes one last journey. Played by a non-actor with Parkinson’s, this impressionistic hybrid offers a journey into the mind and life of a man with a crippling disease. A machine maker and an amateur cosmologist, Barkev can no longer speak. Yet through his journals, his machines, and powerful imagery with music, the film travels into the past and the future of both the man and Lebanon, which is debilitated by sectarian division, left a shell of its former self, dwelling on the past, unable to imagine its own future.
The Lobster Saturday, Star Movies, 9pm
Yorgos Lanthimos is in typically brilliant form with this surreal 2015 absurdist comedy. Colin Farrell stars as a newly single man in a world where single humans are only given 45 days to find a romantic partner before they are turned into an animal of their choosing for the rest of their life. Having been left by his wife, Farrell’s David is escorted to a singles’ hotel, along with his former brother, now his faithful pet dog. Rachel Weisz is the fellow guest with whom he attempts to fend off his imminent transmogrification. It’s a disturbing, yet hilarious look at the nature of relationships, and probably deserved more than its lone Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, which it lost to Manchester by the Sea.