5 things to watch this weekend – 19 to 21 July

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

We’re not short of dreamy coming-of-age stories set over a hot summer, but this one’s a keeper. Janet Planet is the first dip into filmmaking by the celebrated dramatist Annie Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2013 play The Flick. The setting is rural Massachusetts in the summer of 1991, seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler) who has spurned summer camp in favour of lazy days at home with her mum (Julianne Nicholson) and the revolving-door run of friends and suitors who come to visit. Baker eschews dramatic fireworks in favour of a subdued study of character and place, shot on grainy 16mm film that seems to have soaked in the atmosphere of the hot and wistful months.

Where’s it on? BFI Player

During the Sundance-boosted US indie movie boom of the 1990s, Todd Solondz emerged as one of the scene’s most acidic commentators on American life. Welcome to the Dollhouse is his second feature – a curdled picture of the struggles of school life for nerdy, bespectacled seventh grader Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo). Solondz follows her awkward coming of age amid inattentive parenting and the bullying and ridicule of her peers, though Dawn can be her own worst enemy too. Solondz went from here to the lip-curling suburban satire of Happiness (1998), but Dollhouse is where audiences first got on board with his spiky humanity and sour worldview.

Where’s it on? 4K UHD

A touchstone for every hitman movie that’s followed in its wake, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï set the template for cinematic depictions of the hired killer as a man of laconic silence and obsessive routine. Alain Delon is the poker-faced assassin, Jef Costello, who lives a life of monk-like minimalism, but his life of habit is upturned when one of his contractors later takes a contract out on him. Dressed in trench coat and fedora, Costello is a throwback to Hollywood noir of the 1940s, though Melville also mixes in Japanese samurai mythology – Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) owes him royalties. Le Samouraï begins Melville’s late cycle of fatalistic noirs that he made in colour yet nonetheless drained of it. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Out in cinemas 30 years after the summer of Parklife, Blur: To the End follows the recent reunion of Damon Albarn, Alex James, Graham Coxon and Dave Rountree for their 2023 comeback album The Ballad of Darren and two huge live shows at Wembley Stadium. No longer the spring chickens whose swaggering art-pop helped define the Britpop era, Blur are in reflective mode as they look back on those wild years from the comfortable if back-pain riddled vantage point of middle age. Scenes of home life in the country are combined with footage of new studio sessions, as director Toby L offers an intimate portrait of a band grappling with their legacy.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Saturday, 15:30

This hugely ambitious history of American settlement involved three big-name directors (John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall), an all-star cast and three projectors to screen it in the short-lived super-wide Cinerama format. Mounted by MGM, its five-part structure encompasses pioneer life, the civil war and the building of the first transcontinental railroad, before proudly climaxing with scenes of California freeways in the modern era. Its grandness of design (and MGM’s willingness to bankroll it) proved an inspiration to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who gave their gestating 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) project the working title ‘How the Solar System Was Won’.