5 things to watch this weekend – 25 to 27 November

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide, including BFI Southbank

Cannily held back for release during Qatar 2022, this sublime magical realist feature takes place in the ancient Georgian city of Kutaisi while in the grip of World Cup fever. It was one of the critical sensations of last year’s festival season, following the fantastical story of a would-be couple whose first date is scuppered when an evil eye puts a curse on them, transforming their appearance so that they won’t recognise each other again. At the moment of transformation, the narrator of Alexandre Koberidze’s film invites us to close our eyes briefly too, the better to slip into the film’s sense of airy enchantment. The result is something like a film by Éric Rohmer or Abbas Kiarostami touched with the spirit of the Arabian Nights.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Few proved able to resist Rian Johnson’s ingenious 2019 update of the hoary old whodunnit genre, Knives Out, so here is a rare case when a sequel is not only inevitable but actually welcome. Daniel Craig is back as southern-fried sleuth Benoit Blanc, but otherwise it’s all-change for the colourful cast of potential suspects – all egomaniacal ‘disruptors’ of one kind or another – who are invited to a murder-mystery weekend on a Greek island owned by a kind of tech-billionaire Willy Wonka played by Edward Norton. Johnson himself has issued a plea to the press not to divulge the secrets of his fiendishly elaborate Swiss-watch plotting, so it may be safer to focus on the film’s eye-popping production design – not least the eponymous Glass Onion, a translucent island mansion and handy metaphor alike.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Through typically ingenious use of camera angles and expressionistic lighting, Orson Welles made Paris’s abandoned Gare d’Orsay a site of overwhelming paranoia and persecution in this quite brilliant adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel. Anthony Perkins was fresh from playing Psycho’s Norman Bates when he stepped into the shoes of Josef K, the man mysteriously put on trial for crimes which are never specified. With roles for Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli and Welles himself, the beauty of Orson’s version is its ability to exude the Kafkaesque while remaining quintessentially Wellesian in its visual ambition and distortion of space to reflect mental disquiet.

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 9:05pm

Just as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle helped kick off the heist movie genre at the start of the 1950s, this Ealing classic arguably did the same for its comic cousin, the caper movie. Alec Guinness plays the bank clerk with a sideline in smuggling gold bullion in the shape of Eiffel Tower souvenirs – just the sort of benign rebellion against stuffy authority that was the stock in trade of the Ealing comedy (the Vatican still approved though, placing it on its 1995 list of 45 great films). Stanley Holloway, Alfie Bass and Sid James are his partners in crime, while there’s also a small, very early role for the young Audrey Hepburn. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

The French belle époque is brought fulsomely back to life in this 1950s period classic, returning to cinemas for its 70th anniversary. Jacques Becker’s film plunges us into a world we know from Maupassant and impressionist paintings, but makes it flesh and blood in the earthy depiction of the illicit romance between a gangster’s girlfriend (Simone Signoret) and an ex-con looking to go straight (Serge Reggiani). Becker balances the lyricism of Jean Renoir’s belle époque romance Partie de campagne (1936), which he assisted on, with the toughness he’d bring to his stunning later crime films Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Le Trou (1960) – both of which join Casque d’or on StudioCanal’s concurrently released five-film Becker collection on Blu-ray.