5 things to watch this weekend – 15 to 17 November

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Is it too early to be watching Christmas films? No, not when they’re this good. Tyler Thomas Taormina’s film takes place in a fictional Long Island town sometime in the 2000s, as an extended Italian-American family gather for festivities on Christmas Eve. A mood and memory piece more than a traditional narrative, Taormina’s hilarious and warmly nostalgic film gives us beautiful vignettes and a sharply drawn sense of family dynamics. Set to a soundtrack of golden oldies, in many ways it plays like a festive equivalent to George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) – American Tinsel, perhaps. But Terence Davies, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982) and John Huston’s The Dead (1987) are all good reference points too. Now I want to watch this every Christmas. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

One of the year’s best documentaries, this brilliantly original epic maps out a hidden history interweaving jazz music and American intervention in Africa during the Cold War. It all builds to the moment in 1961 when musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach intervened in a meeting of the UN Security Council in order to protest the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. But, with all the thrill of a true-crime doc, it takes in a bewildering amount of historical detail about civil-rights-era America and the role jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, played as ‘jazz ambassadors’ for a CIA looking to shore up American influence in Africa. There’s almost wall-to-wall jazz to listen to, which helps the history go down, and gives Johan Grimonprez’s film a seductively smoky ambience.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

This new box set from Eureka combines four beautiful restorations of the crime serials of French pioneer Louis Feuillade: Fantômas (1913 to 1914), Les Vampires (1915 to 1916), Judex (1916) and Tih Minh (1918). These multi-episode silent serials each run several hours long but make for compulsive viewing once you get a taste for them. Antique yet also modern, they are sinister adventures set in a world of intrigue and paranoia, where one or other nefarious criminal gang or masked avenger is plotting some insidious encroachment on Parisian society. Feuillade’s films have had an incalculable influence on everything from Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock thrillers to Batman and many other comic books besides. 

Where’s it on? 4K UHD and Blu-ray

Stomping on to 4K UHD for its 70th anniversary, this is the original classic from Ishiro Honda in which a 50-metre tall radioactive lizard called Gojira terrorises Tokyo. With new Godzilla films still coming thick and fast, the 1954 Godzilla has always looked difficult to beat for its heady combination of monster mayhem, nuclear anxiety and a surprising strain of reflective melancholia. The original King Kong (1933) is the only thing that can match it in terms of the huge shadow it has cast over the marauding-monster genre ever since. Godzilla, King of the Monsters, which is included as an extra here, is the intriguing 1956 re-edit for the American market, which chopped in a part for Raymond Burr, a year before he became Perry Mason.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Saturday, 1:30pm

Beginning Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s imperial phase of 1940s classics, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp famously ran afoul of Winston Churchill during the Second World War for its depiction of a pompous British military man’s life and loves during three wars. Roger Livesey plays the man we see ageing yet unwavering through 40 years of British history, with Deborah Kerr turning up in three different roles as the woman he falls for and then spends a lifetime attempting to replicate. While you might expect cruel satire and caricature, Powell and Pressburger’s epic is shot through with fondness and a melancholy about the redundancies that time slowly makes of us all. It’s one of Britain’s richest films, and BBC2 is showing it in a double bill with Powell and Pressburger’s no-less-wonderful I Know Where I’m Going! (1945).