5 things to watch this weekend – 17 to 19 March

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

A first feature by Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane is a lively romcom set on and around the eponymous Peckham street. Two twentysomethings, Yas (Vivian Oparah) and Dom (David Jonsson), are both suffering from big breakups when they happen upon each other in the toilet at an art gallery, hit it off and spend the day getting to know each other. In the course of Rye Lane’s pithy 82-minute running time, the pair each has chaotic run-ins with their exes too – Yas’s while attempting to liberate her copy of an A Tribe Called Quest LP from his flat. Filmed on location, Allen-Miller’s debut is sharply written, the right amount of sweet and frequently hilarious.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

In the rearview mirror, this opulent Edith Wharton adaptation doesn’t seem quite the curveball in Martin Scorsese’s career as it did, 30 years ago, when it followed GoodFellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991). Set in 1870s New York and throwing together the extraordinary team of Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder in a buttoned-up high-society love triangle, The Age of Innocence is by now one of several period properties on Marty’s CV. Back in cinemas for its 30th anniversary this week, it remains one of his most ravishing achievements, a poignant story of passion and the passage of time.

Where’s it on? Mubi

Perhaps among the least well known films to rank in the recent Sight and Sound top 250, this landmark of Cuban cinema hasn’t always been easy to see, but turned up on Mubi this week in a new 2K restoration. It’s the sole feature by Sara Gómez, the first Afro-Cuban woman to make a film, who died aged 31 during the editing process following an asthma attack. One Way or Another is a bold, raw blend of drama and documentary in which a romance between a teacher and a macho factory worker takes place against a post-revolutionary urban landscape that’s undergoing rapid redevelopment. Gómez’s earlier short film I’m Going to Santiago (1964) is also streaming.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

The soapy story of a rich playboy trying to make amends after his selfish behaviour causes another man’s death, Magnificent Obsession had already been a 1935 John M. Stahl film when the great German émigré director Douglas Sirk resurrected it for the era of Rock Hudson, CinemaScope and Technicolor. Hudson plays the spoiled rich kid; Jane Wyman the dead man’s widow – and the same duo would reunite for Sirk’s celebrated melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) the following year. Both films are out on Blu-ray in lavish editions from Criterion UK this week, inviting a fresh wallow in their gorgeous visual textures and dam-bursts of emotion.

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Friday, 10.50pm

Banged out in a few days on the West Coast as the 1950s drew to a close, this low-budget comedy horror from Roger Corman has lasted superbly. Biting a piece out of California’s beatnik scene, it sees a busboy in a hipster café getting an unlikely opportunity to make his own waves in the art scene when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat. After he covers it in clay, the feline sculpture is acclaimed as a masterpiece, prompting its creator to start looking for bigger subjects/victims. After this 65-minute wonder, Corman reteamed with scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith for further jet-black laughs: the original The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).