5 things to watch this weekend – 17 to 19 June

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Such is the velocity of François Ozon’s work-rate that UK cinemas are often a film behind in keeping pace. Ozon’s latest film, which screened in Berlin this year, is a new version of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. But Britons first have the chance to catch up with his second latest, a holdover from last year’s Cannes. Everything Went Fine is Ozon in sober mood, as befitting a delicate topic: assisted suicide. Sophie Marceau plays one of two sisters grappling with their ailing father’s wish to end it all at a Swiss clinic. It’s based on a memoir about her own father by Ozon’s frequent screenwriting collaborator, the late Emmanuèle Bernheim. Ozon puts it on screen with commendable calm, insight and surprising humour.

Where’s it on? Film4, Monday, 1.30am

Close to rivalling Ozon in the productivity stakes is Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, whose wise, humanist dramas are an annual fixture at the big festivals. A highlight of Film4’s offerings this weekend, this 2013 film – a prizewinner at Cannes – finds him skirting close to sentimentality, but is arguably none the worse for that. Like Father, like Son sees two families – one well off, one not so – discovering that their respective sons were accidentally switched at birth. Difficult decisions ensue, which Koreeda navigates with his trademark delicacy and nuance. There are agonising emotions here; in its quiet way, the film makes you feel them in the pit of your stomach.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Here’s an antique from the very dawn of the gangster movie. More than a century old, it’s the second of eight collaborations between director Tod Browning and ‘man of a thousand faces’ Lon Chaney, both of whom would soon become more associated with horror and the grotesque. Chaney is just two faces here: a villain called Black Mike Sylva and a heroic Chinese manservant. The yellow face certainly puts a date on proceedings, but there’s much else to fascinate in this tale of moral redemption set amid the “poppy-perfumed alleys” of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Priscilla Lane plays the criminal who’s given up crime in favour of Confucianism, only to swerve back into lawlessness when Sylva frames her father for murder. 

Where’s it on? BFI Player, Blu-ray, iTunes and Amazon Prime 

Lawrence Harding, known simply as Lawrence, is the crooning indie pop star behind Felt, Denim and Go-Kart Mozart. Inspiring devotion in his fans, he’s remained a hero on the fringes, never becoming a household name like many of his fellow travellers in the 1980s indie world. This 2011 documentary from director Paul Kelly (known for his film collaborations with Saint Etienne) is a fascinating portrait of Lawrence in the present day – faded, fragile, fixated on fame and still wrestling with why his dreamy, jangly pop was never fully embraced by the mainstream. Affectionate and revealing, it’s being released in a new Blu-ray edition. 

Where’s it on? Klassiki Online

Soviet era director Dziga Vertov (a pseudonym meaning ‘spinning top’) made the top 10 of the last Sight and Sound critics’ poll with his 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera. This immediate follow-up has been far less widely seen. It’s just as radical in form, though much more overtly a work of Soviet propaganda. Ukraine’s first sound film, it’s subtitled ‘A Symphony of the Donbass’ and is essentially an ode to the efforts of the region’s coalminers to meet the demands of Stalin’s Five Year Plan. What makes it worth stomaching, however, is Vertov’s visionary filmmaking – not just the kind of building-collapsing trickery familiar from Man with a Movie Camera, but his clanging, splintering, cacophonous approach to film sound. Streaming platform Klassiki is profiling it this week in a new restoration.