5 things to watch this weekend – 4 to 6 April

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

By a quirk of scheduling, two films about budding gay novelists and the publishing world open in cinemas this week. First up is Sebastian, the second feature by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä (A Moment in the Reeds, 2017), which sets up a metatextual house of cards as it follows a journalist researching his first novel by going undercover as a male sex worker. Max (Ruaridh Mollica) works at a literary magazine but finds himself increasingly drawn to the taboo night-time world he’s scoping out for his protagonist, the eponymous Sebastian. Featuring graphic sex scenes, Mäkelä’s film weaves together many interesting ideas about the creative process, the nature of performance, and the line between fact and fantasy. 

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Our second author of the week is a YA novelist on the cusp of a breakthrough – but at a busy time of meetings with his publishers and needing to look after his mum, he’s saddled with caring for three more elderly women after his pals dump their mums on him and fly off to a Pride event. Returning to the fray following 2016’s A Date for Mad Mary, Darren Thornton’s tragicomedy, co-written by his brother Colin, is a remake of the 2008 Italian comedy Mid-August Lunch, directed by Gianni Di Gregorio. Four Mothers eschews that film’s foodie Mediterranean trappings, moves the setting to modern Dublin and gives proceedings a healthy twist of Irish charm. 

Where’s it on? BFI Player

Here is another English language remake of a non-English language film, but an exceptionally accomplished one. Sara Colangello’s film is a remake of the 2014 film of the same name by Israeli director Nadav Lapid. Maggie Gyllenhaal steps into the lead role of the preschool teacher who, unable to rise above mediocrity in her own poetry, transposes her creative ambitions to an apparent child prodigy in her care. On screen throughout, Gyllenhaal does her finest work to date here. We’re kept so pressed up against her striving sensitivity that we scarcely sense the film’s inexorable shift towards thriller territory.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 12:30

The ultimate train thriller, Alfred Hitchcock’s British classic is like a novel from the golden age of detective fiction. Except for its Hitchcockian lacing of satirical humour and mischievous sexuality, it’s something Agatha Christie might have written – her own rail-based thriller Murder on the Orient Express was published a few years prior. In fact it’s based on the 1936 mystery The Wheel Spins, by Ethel Lina White, in which a woman travelling in a fictional corner of Europe befriends an elderly woman on a long-distance train only for her new companion to vanish without trace. And everyone else on the train denies ever seeing her. Margaret Lockwood plays the younger woman, Dame May Whitty the elder, and Michael Redgrave is the insolent musicologist who ends up helping out in the quest to discover what happened to the disappearing dame. 

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Here is a wonderful bit of cine-excavation from the Eureka label. Dr Mabuse is the criminal mastermind who was the nefarious axis of two Weimar-era classics from Fritz Lang: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). Lang later made it a trilogy by adding 1960’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which found Mabuse’s malign influence at large in the era of television and CCTV. What UK viewers might not have realised is that the success of Lang’s later film prompted a spin-off cycle of five further films in quick succession up to 1964. Starring Wolfgang Preiss as the evil doctor and directed by a succession of Lang stand-ins that included Argentine pulp master Hugo Fregonese, the films are collected together with Thousand Eyes in this Blu-ray set. The titles are: The Return of Dr Mabuse, The Invisible Dr Mabuse, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Scotland Yard Hunts Dr Mabuse and The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse.