5 things to watch this weekend – 24 to 26 January

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Released in cinemas the day after it clocked up 10 Oscar nominations, Brady Corbet’s epic new drama is an imposing Great American Novel in cinematic form. John Dos Passos might have dreamt it up, but in fact it’s an original screenplay, which Corbet co-wrote with Mona Fastvold. Adrien Brody plays the Holocaust survivor and visionary architect who emigrates to the New World in the post-war era. Before long, he finds himself keeping company with Guy Pearce’s wealthy industrialist, who becomes his patron and commissions him to build an ambitious new community centre. Monolithic in scale at 215 minutes including a 15 minute interval, it makes for engrossing drama, a fictional secret history of perverse power-plays and the pursuit of the American dream.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Conceivably the most gorgeous romantic film of the 1980s, this classic of Hong Kong’s Second New Wave features Anita Mui as the ghost of a 1930s tearoom courtesan who returns to Hong Kong in 1987 to search for the lover (Leslie Cheung) with whom she once agreed to a suicide pact. The director is Stanley Kwan, whose 1992 masterpiece Center Stage was inspired by the short and tragic life of 1930s screen icon Ruan Lingyu. Rouge is similarly fascinated with the interplay of past and present, and with the societal restrictions placed upon women in a gilded, bygone era. This beautiful Blu-ray edition from 88 Films is released alongside an earlier Kwan title, 1986’s Love unto Waste.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

A clutch of Henry Hathaway films also arrive on Blu-ray this week: this Kiplingesque Raj adventure from 1935 and his 1942 western The Shepherd of the Hills. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was the breakthrough film for a director who became a Hollywood veteran, specialising in cowboys and film noir. It features Gary Cooper as one of a trio of soldier friends in a colonial regiment tasked with flushing out a Muslim rebel leader from the hills around the Khyber Pass. Once a classic of the action-adventure genre, it’s the film that gave us the phrase “We have ways to make men talk”, but its reputation has faded somewhat in the 90 years since it became a major hit for Paramount and nabbed seven Oscar nominations.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

For a long time the films of the post-French New Wave director Jean Eustache were very difficult to see, but recent restorations and retrospectives have changed all that, and now his magnum opus – 1973’s The Mother and the Whore – gets a Blu-ray from Criterion. Running some 219 minutes, it revolves around Jean-Pierre Léaud as a young twentysomething Parisian bohemian and intellectual, and his affairs with two women, played by Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun. Steeped in post-May 68 ennui and disillusionment, but also cinephilia, it’s one of cinema’s most frank and emotionally unsparing treatments of adult relationships. Critic David Thomson once warned of Eustache’s film: “It is a dark, vaguely perceived beast on the edge of polite society. Beware.”

Where’s it on? BBC iPlayer

Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary of the Holocaust has been added to BBC iPlayer this week. Its two parts (‘First Era’ and ‘Second Era’) amount to some 543 minutes of running time – a daunting prospect, no doubt, but in all ways a vital viewing experience and a mighty reckoning with this darkest period of human history. Lanzmann shows no footage or recreations of the camps, holding an ethical and representational line that many lesser films have subsequently crossed. Instead, it depends on long interviews and testimonies with survivors and perpetrators, conducted over many years and amounting to an extraordinary archive of eyewitness accounts.