5 things to watch this weekend – 26 to 28 July

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

Jane Schoenbrun made a splash during the pandemic era with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), their unnerving portal into a world of creepypasta and extremely-online gameplay. The non-binary filmmaker has now returned with the next part of their ‘screen trilogy’, in which it’s now a late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque which holds Schoenbrun’s latest alienated young protagonists in its grip. Sometime in the 90s, teenagers Owen and Maddy strike up a friendship over this Buffy-style show, finding a kind of communion in its nocturnal visions of outlandish adventure. Reality and identity become fluid conceits in Schoenbrun’s Lynchian, cathode-ray-lit allegory of trans experience, which also nails the compulsive, obsessional appeal of cult media.

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

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is the Turkish auteur of taciturn masterpieces like Uzak (2002) and Once upon a Time in Anatolia (2011). Then, with 2014’s Winter Sleep, which won him the Palme d’Or, his films suddenly became both extremely talkative and novelistically long. Clocking in at 3 hours and 17 minutes, the masterful About Dry Grasses is one of his finest yet – a film that begins on the fairly familiar ground of tracking the fallout from accusations of impropriety against a male school teacher in rural Anatolia, but deepens in richness and nuance as it progresses towards its transcendent final moments. 

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 15:35

Best known for his Ealing comedies Whisky Galore! (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1951) and his lethal Hollywood noir Sweet Smell of Success (1957), director Alexander Mackendrick was coming towards the end of his career when he made this enjoyable family adventure based on a 1929 novel by Richard Hughes. Beginning in late 19th-century Jamaica, it sees a British colonial couple sending their five children (among them a young Martin Amis) back to Britain for schooling. But somewhere on the Atlantic, their ship is seized upon by pirates led by Anthony Quinn and James Coburn.

Where’s it on? BFI Player

This collegiate farce from Whit Stillman was the erudite indie director’s first film in 14 years, and he’s sadly only made one further feature since – the uproarious Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship (2016). All the more reason to treasure every inane, quotable moment of Damsels in Distress, with its cheap over-lit visuals, its pastel-hued musical sequences and its sustained helium tone. Greta Gerwig, Carrie MacLemore and Megalyn Echikunwoke play the cliquey student do-gooders welcoming recent transfer Lily (Lio Tipton) into their fold and introducing her to life on campus at Seven Oaks University. One of the great comedies of the 2010s.

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Sunday, 08:10

A hidden treasure of film noir, The Chase is one of those delirious 1940s thrillers where the sheer pile-up of intrigue and intoxicating atmosphere distracts you from the sense-slipping loopiness of the plot. This much we know: Robert Cummings plays an army veteran, back from the war, drifting into Miami and happy to take work as a chauffeur for a gangster. He falls in love with the boss’s wife (Michèle Morgan) and together they flee to Havana. Amid the tropical heat, retribution follows, but so does a narrative switcheroo that casts doubt on everything that’s happened so far. As critic David Thomson wrote, “The Chase is a great demented rapture, so close to dream as to make no difference.”