The Herald - The Herald Magazine
THIS WEEK’S BEST FILMS
SATURDAY
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) (C4, 9.15pm)
Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s blackly comic thriller pits one vigilante parent against her local police force in a fictional midwestern town. Impeccably scripted and blessed with a blistering lead performance from Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a near perfect film. Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell also star.
Jackie (2016) (C4, 11.30pm)
In Dallas, Texas, on November
22, 1963, the 35th president of the United States of America was shot dead in an atrocity that spawned endless conspiracy theories. In director Pablo Larrain’s biopic, Natalie Portman portrays Jackie Kennedy in the days following the assassination of her husband, John F Kennedy, as she tries to deal with the extremes of private grief and the public eye.
SUNDAY
Stand By Me (1986) (C5, 4.25pm)
Based on The Body, a short story by Stephen King, this drama set in the 1950s follows a group of four 12-year-old boys as they set out on an adventure in the Oregon wilderness. The lads are looking for the body of a missing teenager, but fail to anticipate the other horrors they’ll encounter along the way. Stephen King has claimed this was the first big-screen adaptation of one of his works that he was entirely happy with – it’s easy to see why.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) (C4, 10pm)
In a dystopian 2023, Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his kin, including Magneto (Ian
Swedish-born Symphony singer Zara Larsson serves up an exclusive musical performance in The Garden Sessions.
The Queen: In Her Own Words (C5, 9.15pm)
In April, during lockdown, the Queen delivered a historic and stirring televised speech to the nation. It was only the fifth occasion that Her Majesty has spoken to Britons during unprecedented times, following her address at the time of the first Gulf War in February 1991, the deaths of Diana in 1997 and the Queen Mother 2002, and her Diamond Jubilee message in June 2012. She has since spoken again this year on the 75th anniversary of VE
Day. In this documentary, packed with rare archive and insight from palace insiders, we witness the impact the words of the longestserving monarch in British history during her 68-year reign. From her public and private interactions with world leaders, her emotional speeches during family tragedies, to her deeply personal Christmas broadcasts, this film reveals the woman beneath the crown.
SUNDAY
Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix Highlights (C4, 7.30pm)
The Hungaroring has delivered some cracking races in its illustrious history but few were as thrilling as the 2019 edition. Lewis Hamilton
McKellen) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), stand on the precipice of extinction. The Sentinel programme, conceived by scientist Dr Bolivar Trask, has almost wiped out the mutant population and any human sympathisers using an army of highly skilled automatons attuned to mutant DNA. One glimmer of hope remains: if Kitty Pryde can harness her abilities and propel Wolverine’s consciousness back to 1973, they might be able to stop alluring shapeshifter Mystique from assassinating Trask.
and Max Verstappen had a race-long dingdong battle for the lead, with the Mercedes team playing a strategy masterstroke and Hamilton doing his bit by brilliantly hunting down the Red Bull driver to clinch a sensational victory. Following the opening two rounds of the season, both held at the Red Bull Ring in Austria, the drivers and their teams head to the circuit in Mogyorod, Hungary, for the latest race.
Downton Abbey (STV, 8pm)
When Julian Fellowes’ period drama about life above and below stairs at a Yorkshire stately home began in September 2010, nobody expected it to become a worldwide TV juggernaut that would go on to spawn a