5 things to watch this weekend – 13 to 15 September

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

In this striking feature debut, director Naqqash Khalid turns the camera back on to the British film industry itself. Starring Nabhaan Rizwan as an actor stuck on a conveyor belt of auditions leading nowhere, it’s a withering satire of the expectations and prejudices facing brown actors in an industry where there’s room for only one breakout brown star at a time, and where the rest of the available roles lean into depressing stereotypes. It lands plenty of bruising blows on the film scene in an age of purported diversity, but this is no tub-thumping message movie. Built around a performance of startling, chameleonic intensity from Rizwan, it’s a slippery character study as much as an acidic broadside.

Where’s it on? Netflix

Landing direct to Netflix at the end of last week, Rebel Ridge is the new film from Jeremy Saulnier, a proven hand at sweatily tense thrillers with Blue Ruin (2013) and Green Room (2015). This one begins with a cyclist (an absorbing performance from British newcomer Aaron Pierre) being aggressively knocked off the road by two police officers in their patrol car. He’s carrying bail money for his brother, but the cash is confiscated by the cops via civil forfeiture, and his attempts to reclaim it lead him into a murky network of small-town corruption and deep-rooted racism. Although overlong at 131 minutes, Saulnier’s film still counts as one of the year’s most riveting crime dramas.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

One of Joan Crawford’s finest hours, this classic melodrama is the first screen adaptation of James M. Cain’s Depression-era novel about the travails of a mother striving to make a life for her ungrateful daughter. Todd Haynes has since returned to Cain’s classic for a miniseries with Kate Winslet, but Warner Bros’ black-and-white original didn’t leave much room for improvement. Crawford won the Oscar for best actress for her steely Mildred, whose efforts to support bratty Veda include building up a southern Californian restaurant empire. Zachary Scott is memorably sleazy as her Pasadena playboy lover, whle Ernest Haller’s inky cinematography and the new flashback-from-a-murder structure cast Cain’s story well into noir country.

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

This warm tale of late-life romance has landed directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha in trouble with the Iranian government, which took away their passports and thereby prevented them from travelling to accompany the film at its world premiere in Berlin in February. Such oppressive sanctions seem tragically heavy-handed for this compassionate film about an ageing widow, Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), determining to meet a new man and soon striking up a rich chemistry with taxi driver ​​Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi). More sweet-toothed than most of the Iranian films that get distributed in the UK, the film depends on the remarkable performances of these two wearied but hopeful characters, and the gentle magic in their moment of connection. 

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 09:25

Orson Welles’s third feature as director makes perfect autumn viewing. It’s set in the small Connecticut town of Harper, where leaves are falling from the trees. “Gets dark earlier these days,” storekeeper Mr Potter (Billy House) remarks across a draughts board, killing time while he waits for wily investigator Mr Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) to take his turn. Into this ordinary community comes a high-ranking Nazi abomination played by Welles himself, who is hiding out as a respectable New England schoolmaster while he awaits the rise of a Fourth Reich. Although pulpier than Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger offers up plenty of Wellsian atmospherics, and – in its incorporation of recent footage from the concentration camps – a sense of real gravity.