5 things to watch this weekend – 28 to 30 June

Where’s it on? Disney+

When we last met fiery chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), it was soft-launch night at his new restaurant, and Carmy got stuck inside the walk-in fridge, left to battle his demons and spiral into ballistic rants. Christopher Storer’s much-binged kitchen drama returned for its third season this week, with the temperature turned back down to barely a simmer. In fact, it kicks off in oddly ambient mode, with episode one seeing a contrite Carmy reflect back on his jobs working under various imposing chefs – including Olivia Colman’s Andrea Terry – at a string of high-end eateries. Cue downtempo montages following the painstaking craft and precision of plates being prepared, closer to The Taste of Things (2023) than the chaotic worlds of Boiling Point (2023) or Kitchen Nightmares. All 10 courses have arrived at once on Disney+.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Not to be confused with Bicycle Thieves (1948) director Vittorio De Sica, Vittorio De Seta was a later comer to the Italian neorealist style, beginning with a series of 10-minute short films in the mid to late 1950s documenting the lives of peasants and fishermen in his native Sicily. Gleaming colour jewels, these 10 miniature masterpieces have been collected under the title The Lost World and are now being made available as an accompaniment to this Radiance Blu-ray edition of De Seta’s subsequent feature debut, Bandits of Orgosolo. Filmed in breathtaking black and white against the plunging, mountainous landscapes of Sardinia, the feature offers the same earthy poetry as the shorts, telling the fateful story of a peasant who is forced to hide out in the hills after being suspected of murder. 

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

Winner of the Best Documentary award at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, Bye Bye Tiberias is an affecting tapestry of home movie footage documenting generational layers of exile and displacement in the lives of the women of a Palestinian family. Filmmaker Lina Soualem is the daughter of the renowned actor Hiam Abbass, who plays Marcia Roy, wife of Logan Roy, in TV’s Succession. Together they return to Lake Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee), where Abbass took Soualem for childhood summers, and where Abbass previously lived before taking the decision to emigrate to France. Soualem’s father was a compulsive video-recordist, so their shared memories are conjured in a rich archive of footage, while her grandmother Nemat recalls an earlier era still: the Palestine she knew before the war of 1948.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Ken Russell’s cycle of composer films were always chockful of invention, but they started off – in his BBC days – relatively soberly. By the time of this Tchaikovsky drama from 1971, however, all bets were off. Starring Richard Chamberlain as the great Russian tunesmith, The Music Lovers is the artistic biopic as all-you-can-eat buffet: a wild, passionate, visually tempestuous ode to a man and his music. Centring on Tchaikovsky’s marriage to Antonina Milyukova (a fantastic Glenda Jackson) as a destructive attempt to conceal the composer’s homosexuality, Russell’s film is almost back to back with Tchaikovsky’s scores, accompanied by music-video-like sequences in which the director’s visual excesses run riot. An early sequence set to his towering first piano concerto is a particular highlight.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 15:00

One of my favourite ways of thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s peerless espionage thriller is to see Cary Grant’s Madison Avenue adman Roger O. Thornhill as equivalent to the Daffy Duck who is teased and prodded by his mischievous creator in the fourth-wall-breaking animated classic Duck Amuck (1953). In Hitchcock’s hands, the US becomes a kind of cosmic obstacle course for the beleaguered Thornhill, who is mistaken for a spy by enemy agents and left to inhabit his mistaken identity by government agencies for whom the ruse is a happy convenience. Crop-dusting planes swoop out of the sky. A borrowed suit is a size too small. The imposing faces of Mount Rushmore gaze on as Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint’s waveringly trustworthy Eve Kendall make a treacherous descent. North by Northwest is a source of infinite pleasure.