5 things to watch this weekend – 6 to 8 September

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Fans of the queasy, stomach-knot cinema of filmmakers like Michael Haneke or David Cronenberg would do well to pay attention to this new Canadian chiller. Be warned though: it’s not for the faint-hearted, even if you never actually see the horrific crimes at its centre. Pascal Plante’s film revolves around the trial of a man accused of killing a succession of teenage girls during live-streams for paying customers on the dark web. But it follows the case from the askew perspective of a mysterious fashion model (a performance of laser-focused derangement by Juliette Gariépy) who obsessively attends the court’s public gallery every day and, by night, conducts illicit investigations of her own on the internet. Red Rooms is not so much about the crimes, but about the murky mechanics of our obsession with them.

Where’s it on? BFI Player

Cold-blooded killings are also at the centre of this stark adaptation of Truman Capote’s 1966 true-crime novel of the same name. Capote’s non-fiction book followed the case of two ex-convicts whose attempted burglary of a Kansas farmhouse in the middle of the night ended with four counts of murder. Richard Brooks’ film adaptation for Columbia Pictures went quickly into production and became one of those late 1960s American pictures that gave audiences a bracingly modern treatment of violence and adult themes. It’s still a gold standard for treating true-crime stories on screen, even being shot on the actual locations where the crimes were committed. Conrad Hall’s black-and-white cinematography lends proceedings a grim, nocturnal poetry.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Following his arresting debut feature Apostasy (2017), the drama about a Manchester community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Daniel Kokotajlo now returns with Starve Acre. Steeped in the atmospherics of 1970s British film and TV horror, it’s the latest in the current strain of British films that seem to have been spawned by the unholy communion of Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man (a double bill in UK cinemas in 1973). Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark play the Yorkshire couple whose lives take an eerie turn after their son starts hearing things. An ancient tree stump, a hare’s carcass and a mythic figure known as Jack Dandelion all haunt Kokotajlo’s film, which is based on Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel of the same name.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Another cinema dusting off – now it’s 75 – for British cinema’s definitive mystery thriller. The Third Man is by far the most famous of the cycle of homegrown ‘spiv’ dramas that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, centring around the profiteers and ne’er-do-wells who kept the black markets flourishing during the rationing era. Here the spiv is Harry Lime, devilishly personified by Orson Welles as the charming scoundrel – presumed dead – who steps out the shadows of a Vienna doorway and into screen immortality. Joseph Cotten is the American pulp novelist who arrives in town looking for Lime, while cinematographer Robert Krasker supplies the dutch angles and lengthening shadows that push this deep into noir territory.

Where’s it on? BBC iPlayer

Here is a nice surprise turning up on BBC iPlayer – the film of an on-stage interview with Alfred Hitchcock at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank) in 1969. Interviewed by director Bryan Forbes (Whistle Down the Wind, 1961), Hitchcock was near the end of his film career but with his taste for mirth and mischief clearly undimmed as he fields earnest and often brutally frank questions from the audience. Films that didn’t turn out so well, the dodgy art direction of Marnie (1964), the ethics of showing murders on screen – the Master of Suspense gamely answers to it all. It’s entertaining stuff, and offers a good view inside the NFT as it was more than 50 years ago.