5 things to watch this weekend – 28 to 30 March

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Misericordia is the eccentric new comic murder drama from Alain Guiraudie, the French director best known for his humid 2013 cruising-ground thriller Stranger by the Lake. Like most of his films, it’s set in France’s rural south, where Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his hometown to attend the funeral of the baker, a former boss. But after coming to blows with a confrontational neighbour, a Ripley-esque scenario involving deception, track-covering and the local gendarmes ensues. With its autumnal, mushroom-season setting, Misericordia has the comforting wrap of an ITV mystery, albeit one with deeper ruminations about the nature of guilt and the weight of actions. It’s also an irrepressibly polyamorous film, packed with promiscuity and notable penis shots.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

In a sharp left turn from The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), his celebrated documentaries about atrocities in 1960s Indonesia, Joshua Oppenheimer has returned after a decade with a surprising fiction debut: a two-and-a-half-hour post-apocalyptic musical. The End imagines that civilisation on Earth has been wiped out by environmental collapse, but a wealthy family headed by Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon live on in a cavernous salt-mine bunker filled with earthly spoils. George Mackay plays their grown-up son, who has spent his whole life in this luxurious captivity but who finds a potential mate when a stray survivor from the surface (Moses Ingram) comes upon their lair. The Broadway-style belters boast lyrics by Oppenheimer himself, and are potently delivered with not-professional-singer inflections by the starry cast.

Where’s it on? 4K UHD and Blu-ray

Not many TV movies have made the leap to 4K UHD, but then Duel is no ordinary TV movie. The feature-length debut of Steven Spielberg, this brutally efficient thriller led to a 50-years-and-counting career as one of Hollywood’s most famous filmmakers. In some ways a dress rehearsal for Jaws (1975), with a smoke-spewing truck instead of a shark, it still looks like one of Spielberg’s most riveting creations. Dennis Weaver plays the salesman travelling through the California desert who is menaced at every turn by a road-hogging juggernaut. We never see the driver, which gives an abstract, allegorical dimension to what becomes a white-knuckle battle for survival. 

Where’s it on? Talking Pictures TV, Saturday, 22:50

There’s further road rage in this tarmac-based thriller from the height of the Ozploitation era. Stacy Keach plays the truck driver who teams up with Jamie Lee Curtis’s hitchhiker to go up against a serial killer who is offing travellers on the lonely desert highways of south-west Australia. Director Richard Franklin had already earned his Ozploitation credentials with the sex comedy The True Story of Eskimo Nell (1975) and the psychokinesis horror Patrick (1978). Here he taps into the rich pipeline of Aussie petrolhead movies that includes The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and Mad Max (1979), and comes up with an impressively clammy outback chiller. Hollywood was so impressed that Franklin was hired to direct the 1983 Psycho sequel.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

This beguilingly strange and involving docu-fiction reflects autistic experience and perception, both in its subject matter and its daring formal qualities, but never seeks to explain or decipher. Its various subjects include a film club host with a fascination with B-movie schlock and a woman taking an eye-tracking test, and we see how autism fits into their lives in different ways. But there are also more abstract sequences, which seem to invite us to examine the frame in new ways, like an eye-tracking test of our own. The Stimming Pool is a film that’s both grounded, given it’s about human experience, but also somehow otherworldly in its effect. Even at only 67 minutes, it’s stimulating filmmaking – the work of an autistic group known as the Neurocultures Collective (Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker) working in tandem with filmmaker Steven Eastwood.