5 things to watch this weekend – 7 to 9 February

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

This commanding drama by fugitive Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is somewhere between The Ear and Lear – that is, between Karel Kachyna’s banned 1970 Czech film about a married couple driven to distraction by the fact that their house may have been bugged by the authorities, and Shakespeare’s tragedy about a father driven mad by the competing loyalties of his daughters. In Rasoulof’s film, the father is a lawyer who has taken on the role of an investigating judge, a prestigious promotion which nonetheless makes him a puppet of the state expected to overturn evidence and sign spurious death sentences. It puts an ever-escalating strain on his life at home with his wife and two progressively-minded daughters, amid a febrile, paranoid atmosphere in which mobile phone footage captures anti-hijab protests being violently suppressed. 

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

More than two years have passed now since the earthquake that brought Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the top of Sight and Sound’s famous once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll. Now re-released in cinemas alongside an Akerman retrospective at BFI Southbank, the film radically reframed who and what great cinema could be about, simply following the daily toil of a Belgian housewife played by Delphine Seyrig: her domestic chores, her interactions with her young son and her clandestine life as a sex worker. Its rise to the top of the poll was seen as a shock result in most quarters, but in fact Akerman’s film was already at number 19 by 2000 when the Village Voice conducted a similar poll of critics. Some of that shock has subsided now, but Jeanne Dielman is best seen on the big screen and now we have it there.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

The first of Anthony Mann’s superb cycle of five psychological westerns starring James Stewart, Winchester ’73 tells the story of the eponymous rifle as it passes from one owner to the next through the Wild West, having initially been won in a shooting competition by Stewart’s grudge-settling Lin McAdam. Like Max Ophuls’ La Ronde from the same year, it uses this cyclical, baton-passing structure to offer a rolling panorama of society, taking in merchants, saloon girls, Native Americans (including one Rock Hudson), soldiers, outlaws and so on. Filmed in black and white by the great William C. Daniels, whose career stretches back to silent-era collaborations with Erich von Stroheim, it’s a western etched in shades of noir and steeped in moral ambiguity.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Don Bluth was the renegade who, along with 10 other Disney animators, left their jobs at the House of Mouse to set up his own rival animation studio, leading to 1980s children’s favourites such as An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988) which are sometimes credited with spurring Disney out of its own creative doldrums and into its 1990s renaissance. Bluth’s first production was this cult rodent-based fantasy based on Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. That NIMH is an acronym standing for ‘National Institute of Mental Health’, where said rats were the subject of scientific experimentation, is a clue that Bluth’s film strays into much darker territory than your average Disney film, closer in fact to the likes of Watership Down (1978). This week sees a welcome Blu-ray in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 23:55

A late-night opportunity to catch this second feature from the late David Lynch, his first and only film made on British soil. Lynch’s freakish debut Eraserhead (1977) had found an unexpected admirer in Mel Brooks, who approached him to direct this period tale of John Merrick, the disfigured ‘elephant man’ who became a sideshow sensation in Victorian London. John Hurt underwent hours of make-up for his piercing turn as Merrick, while Anthony Hopkins plays the doctor who takes him in for scientific study. Until The Straight Story (1999), this was always superficially the most conventional thing in the Lynch back catalogue, but it could hardly have been made by anyone else, sharing Eraserhead’s Stygian monochrome and its fascination with revulsion.