Film choice

Gravity (2013) ITV2, 7.10PM ★★★★★

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a heart-achingly tender film about the miracle of motherhood, and the billion-to-one odds against any of us being here, astronauts or not. It’s also a totally absorbing, often overpowering spectacle – a $100million action movie in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play two Hollywood-handsome spacefarers, fighting for their lives 375 miles above the Earth’s crust.

Foxcatcher (2014) BBC TWO, 9.00PM; NOT SCOTLAND ★★★★★

Foxcatcher is a smoke-black parable of modern America, with a screenplay – based on real events – as tense and tuned as piano strings. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo play the Schultz brothers, Olympic wrestlers who are dragged into a world of privilege and prejudice at a family estate run by Steve Carell’s (unrecognisable, chilling and wonderful) strange, sports-mad millionaire.

The Goob (2014) BBC TWO, 11.35PM; NOT NORTHERN IRELAND ★★★★

Guy Myhill’s impressive debut set in Norfolk is an essay in Brit poetic social realism. Tensions rise to boiling point during a hot summer as Goob (Liam Walpole) finishes school and navigates the rural poverty trap of the Fens. Embodying the beauty and boredom of the area, Goob spends his days getting drunk, spying on girls and trying to maintain a strained relationship with his mother’s boyfriend.