5 things to watch this bank holiday weekend – 26 to 29 August

Where’s it on? BBC Two, Saturday, 1.45pm

If Vertigo (1958) is the greatest film of all time, then what do we call North by Northwest? Released just a year apart, these twin Hitchcock masterpieces could scarcely be more different. But while it lacks the profound, perverse depths of Vertigo (it never attempts them), his cross-country spy adventure has proven no less influential – on the Bond series for a start – and equally impossible to surpass. It’s the set-piece-loaded thriller par excellence, but it’s also a vision of America as a cosmic obstacle course of grids and lines in which Cary Grant’s man on the run resembles nothing so much as Daffy Duck being teased by his mischievous creator in the fourth-wall-breaking Chuck Jones classic Duck Amuck (1953). 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide and Curzon on Demand

Speaking of mischievous creators, Penélope Cruz gets to play a flamboyant auteur in this delicious film industry satire from Argentinian directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn. Celebrated for her long-running collaborations with Almodóvar, Cruz grabs a taste of things on the other side of the camera playing the Cannes-bothering directorial diva rehearsing two temperamentally opposed star actors – played by Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martinez – on her latest project, the adaptation of a novel about estranged brothers. Duprat and Cohn get some big laughs out of her unorthodox methods, likewise their knowing observations about the international film scene.

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

Actor Nana Mansah’s directorial debut is a gem: a pungent and distinctive comedy-drama set within the Ghanaian diaspora in Brooklyn. Mansah herself plays the neuro-oncology student at Columbia University who suddenly inherits her mum’s Christian bookstore and befriends the shop’s only employee, an ex-convict. Superficially comparable to other recent NYC diaspora comedies like Appropriate Behavior (2014) or The Farewell (2019) in its exploration of the tensions between family tradition and modern city life, Mansah’s Kickstarter-assisted project packs a tremendous amount of heart, flavour and insight into its slender 79-minute running time.

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 5.50pm

A terse, tough trucker noir, Hell Drivers is something like the British Wages of Fear. Get that cast: Stanley Baker, Peggy Cummins, Herbert Lom, a pre-Bond Sean Connery, a pre-Doctor Who William Hartnell and a pre-Danger Man Patrick McGoohan. Their world centres around a haulage company with tight targets. They run 10-ton loads over rough roads, and you’re out if you fall behind schedule. Driver rivalry erupts into fistfights. You need a hard nose to stay the distance. The director is Cy Endfield, who went on to make Zulu (1964). The who’s-who supporting cast also includes Sid James, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum, Alfie Bass and Jill Ireland. It’s a classic.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

It was Douglas Fairbanks who recommended Buster Keaton to Metro for the lead role in The Saphead, Keaton’s first feature-length film. Emerging on Blu-ray this week, it’s a film that’s suffered a low reputation, perhaps because viewers come expecting Keaton’s usual acrobatic pratfalls and visual invention. In fact, The Saphead isn’t even really a comedy – it’s more a comic melodrama in which Keaton plays the dimwitted but fabulously wealthy son of a Wall Street trader. His fate involves a silver mine, a sweetheart, a dodgy investor and an illegitimate child, the entangled complications of which come to a head during an extended climax on the trading floor, when we do get a decent sampling of Keatonesque antics.