5 things to watch this weekend – 28 February to 2 March

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Here is a 1980s romcom to rank alongside Moonstruck (1987) or When Harry Met Sally (1989). Brimming with life and humour, Crossing Delancey is Joan Micklin Silver’s tale of a thirtysomething Jewish New Yorker (Amy Irving) who falls for an attractive author (Jeroen Krabbé) at the bookstore where she works. Meanwhile, her mother – keen to marry her off – sets her up on a date with a pickle salesman on the Lower East Side (Local Hero’s Peter Riegert). Micklin Silver’s star has been rising of late, thanks to her spiky, sharply written comedies of manners Between the Lines (1977) and Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) reemerging from semi-obscurity. Crossing Delancey, which comes to Blu-ray this week, should win over plenty of new fans.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Inspired by real events which were first chronicled in the 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, this Hindi charmer is about Nasir Shaikh, a film fan in the eponymous Maharastran city. Though far from the bright lights of Mumbai and the megabudgets of Bollywood, Shaikh dreams big and begins his own grassroots moviemaking business, starting by creating mash-ups of Jackie Chan, Buster Keaton and Hindi action films. When the piracy police come calling, he switches gears to embark on a zero-budget remake of one of his favourite films, Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 blockbuster Sholay. Director Reema Kagti turns Shaikh’s success story into an uplifting ode to indie filmmaking and unputdownable DIY spirit. 

Where’s it on? BFI Player

If you’re still stunned by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) replacing Vertigo (1958) at the top of Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade Greatest Films poll, here is the film that splits the difference and suggests that Akerman and Hitchcock have more in common than you’d think. One of 13 Akerman titles added to BFI Player this week, La Captive is Akerman’s hypnotic adaptation of one of the middle volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which the protagonist, overcome with neurotic jealousy, follows his lover around to spy on her as she goes about her life business. Updating the story to a contemporary setting, Akerman’s film in many ways echoes the driving scenes in Vertigo, as James Stewart follows Kim Novak around San Francisco. In any case, this film is a mesmerising study of the voyeuristic urge.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Douglas Sirk is the German émigré director celebrated for smuggling social critique into his cycle of 1950s Technicolor tearjerkers, including All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959). But his first run of films in Germany are the kind of titles you’d see listed in reference books but never expected to be able to actually watch. That is, until this essential set from Eureka, which collects his first three features – April, Fool!, The Girl from Marsh Croft and Pillars of Society (all 1935) – alongside three early shorts. No less than the same label’s Lubitsch in Berlin set several years back, this collection provides fascinating evidence of Sirk’s creative energies taking shape.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 13:30

Richard III is the most straightforward of the three Shakespeare films directed by Laurence Olivier. There’s none of the centuries-collapsing structure of his wartime Henry V (1944) or the gothic noir atmosphere of his Hamlet (1948). Yet by virtue of Olivier’s own delicious turn as the hunchbacked king alone, it remains an irresistible Technicolor pageant, and easily among the finest versions of one of Shakespeare’s history plays on film, featuring a cast packed with fellow acting knights, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Cedric Hardwicke. Olivier constrains the scenes of Richard’s plotting and machination within palace walls before the action heads outside for the fateful battle at Bosworth Field.