5 things to watch this weekend – 21 to 23 March

Where’s it on? Netflix

Generating huge buzz since it landed on Netflix last week, Adolescence is the harrowing new four-part drama co-created by Jack Thorne (This Is England) and actor Stephen Graham. Each episode offers a different angle on a horrific case in which a 13-year-old boy stands accused of murdering a female classmate. Under the direction of Philip Barantini (who Graham worked with on the high-tension 2021 cooking drama Boiling Point), each episode is also one elaborate long take, beginning with the arrest of young Jamie (remarkable 15-year-old newcomer Owen Miller), his initial interrogation by detectives Ashley Walters and Faye Marsay, and the stunned reactions of his parents (Graham and Christine Tremarco).

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

There are echoes of Watership Down in this animal-based apocalyptic animation, which has proved such a red letter day for Latvian cinema that a statue of its cat protagonist has gone up in the capital of Riga. It was already a huge hit at home and on the festival circuit, but the crowning glory came when it beat out competition from Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Aardman’s latest Wallace & Gromit film to win the Oscar for best animated feature. The film is the brainchild of Gints Zilbalodis, whose previous feature Away (2019) has now also just been re-released in UK cinemas to crest some of this success. Like Away, Flow is dialogue-free, following the travails of a dark cat and the various animals it meets in a world that’s been transformed irrevocably by rising waters. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Fans of films including The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and Burning (2018) or the formally precise psychodramas of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Michael Haneke should consider this feature debut from Chinese filmmaker Lin Jianjie. It’s a cuckoo-in-the-nest story about a bourgeois Chinese family with one son – this being the era of China’s one-child policy – who more or less adopts one of his classmates after he visits their home and slowly inveigles himself into their family life. How much of the inveigling is purposeful is the well-sustained enigma of Lin’s film. Might it be that this smart, well-mannered boy has no deceptive motive at all? Some of the film’s shots have circular masking around them, suggesting the view through a microscope – and indeed, what ensues isn’t so much a brief history of a family as the vivisection of one.

Where’s it on? 4K UHD and Blu-ray

Making the step up to 4K UHD this week, Yojimbo is the lone-swordsman classic from Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune as the wandering ronin who wedges himself into the middle of a dispute between rival businessmen in a village in feudal Japan. Scaled down from his multi-warrior epic Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo has been no less influential – inspiring spaghetti westerns, Star Wars movies and Bruce Willis actioners alike. Sanjuro is the cheerful sequel, played for laughs as much as bloodletting – a balance it manages with aplomb. The new disc features a host of contextual extras, including a short documentary with the delightful title ‘Out of the Dust Storm and into the Koi Pond’.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Saturday, 14:40

Howard Hawks’s film of the Raymond Chandler novel sets a high bar for entertainment, not so much adapting the Philip Marlowe detective story as trying it on like something from a dressing-up box. It’s often called a film noir, but lacks that genre’s essential moroseness, instead offering a vision of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (then about to be married) that frankly feels borderline ecstatic in its embrace of play, fun, eroticism and innuendo. Still, the bones are here: private dick Marlowe is summoned to the mansion of a General Sternwood to investigate the blackmailers who have revealing photos of his younger daughter. Hawks treats this set-up like a gateway to pleasure, happily getting lost in the ins and outs of the plot but somehow producing one of old Hollywood’s most delicious films.