5 things to watch this weekend – 20 to 22 September

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

Coralie Fargeat’s outrageous new body-horror burlesque riffs on those two great 1950 showbiz satires about ageing stars – All About Eve and Sunset Blvd – as it gives us a career-comeback Demi Moore playing a fading celebrity who turns to a black-market stem-cell-generating drug to help restore her youth. Cue the arrival – in a Cronenbergian birthing sequence – of a younger, fitter doppelganger (played by Margaret Qualley), whose staggering beauty and buff physique soon send audience ratings soaring. Into this go-for-broke assault on the cults of beauty and youth go bits of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), music from Vertigo (1958), set pieces from Carrie (1976) and The Shining (1980) and plenty more besides. Fargeat stuffs it all into the blender and turns the power to full. 

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Among the cinema’s most extraordinary recreations of Ancient Egypt, this Polish superproduction about the reign of Rameses XIII rivals the most ambitious Hollywood epics of its time – and, in terms of verisimilitude, arguably surpasses most of them. Only the documentary-style pyramid-building scenes of Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs (1955) come close. The director here is Jerzy Kawelerowicz, best known for his possessed-nuns drama Mother Joan of the Angels (1961). But the staggering sets and costumes are down to the Egyptian Shadi Abdel Salam, three years before he turned director himself with his sublime tomb-raiding drama The Night of Counting the Years (1969). Pharaoh shares some of that film’s mystery and austerity. It’s a valuable rediscovery on Blu-ray.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

With both Saint Omer (2022) and last year’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall (2023), French filmmakers have given the modern courtroom drama a welcome shot in the arm. Exhibit C is this new film from Cédric Kahn, an almost entirely court-focused piece that recreates the 1976 case of Pierre Goldman, a far-left radical who was imprisoned for two murders during an armed robbery but was subsequently granted a retrial. Amid precise mid-70s period detail and a frequently combustible mood in court, Kahn simply tracks the drama of the unfolding trial, trusting us to be absorbed by the volleys between the opposing advocates and the unruly interjections of Goldman himself. He’s charismatically portrayed by Arieh Worthalter, who won the César award for best actor.

Where’s it on? Mubi

There’s a wayward, ambling magic to this rediscovered French gem from 1980. It takes place over a single night in Paris, beginning in the foyer of a porn cinema, where we meet the eponymous Simone and her friend Martine working as ushers. Later Simone heads out to a lesbian club, and then – in the last of the film’s three distinct sections – is driven home by a random older man. No real drama emerges from these episodes. The film is more about its underbelly atmospheres, the offbeat rhythms of its characters, and the sense of the night as a time of possibility. Marie-Claude Treilhou’s debut feature has something in common with lo-fi, No Wave-adjacent US indies like Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) – also set in a porn theatre – and Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk (1986). 

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 21:05

Orson Welles’s warped, wild and unbeatable noir begins in Central Park and ends with a shootout in a hall of mirrors in a San Francisco amusement park. We get there on board the private yacht of crooked attorney Arthur Bannister and his alluring wife Elsa (Rita Hayworth), which is navigated through the Panama Canal and up the coast of Mexico by able Irish seaman Michael O’Hara (Welles himself). Michael falls for Elsa, of course – Welles and Hayworth were married in real life. But their marriage was coming apart at the time, and The Lady from Shanghai is steeped in perverse undercurrents of attraction and revulsion. The languorous erotic mood of the Acapulco sequences has never been matched.