5 things to watch this weekend – 7 to 9 June

Where’s it on? YouTube

“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” announced David Lynch from his X account on 27 May – cue spasms of anticipation from Lynch fans around the globe. Could it be his long-rumoured Wisteria project? Or even a new series of Twin Peaks? All would be revealed on 5 June this week when ‘Sublime Eternal Love’ was offered into the digital ether – the first single from a new album collaboration between Lynch and Texas-born singer Chrystabell titled Cellophane Memories. It was released with this accompanying Lynch-directed music video, a bewitching crumb of Lynchiana in which a flickering light illuminates multiple haunting images of Chrystabell singing her sepulchral 4AD-style dream-pop.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

From Belgian director Bas Devos comes an unexpectedly wondrous brief-encounter romance, with something of the quietist magic of Hong Sangsoo or even Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It imagines a meet-cute between Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, and Shuxiu (played by Wang Bing collaborator Liyo Gong), a Belgian-Chinese doctoral student in bryology – the study of mosses. Their gentle spark is the only dramatic motor for a film where chemistry between two people feels sufficiently momentous. ‘Here’ is a suitable title: building to an ambling walk in the forest together, Devos’s film is hyper-present in its moments and details, where two people’s blossoming interest is as closely mic’d as the nature sounds (legendary British sound recordist Chris Watson helped on these) or as detailed as the organisms the film shows in microscopic close-up.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray, DVD, digital and on screen at BFI Southbank

After the dizzying, florid, Technicolor peaks of Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made this startling narrowing of their sights: a dark, moody black-and-white noir about wartime bomb disposal and the urge to self-destruct. David Farrar – Black Narcissus’s hirsute Mr Dean – plays the ‘backroom’ scientist with a prosthetic leg, a taste for the anaesthetising power of heavy drinking, and an expertise in weaponry and defusing the booby-trapped bombs left after Nazi bombardment. Permeated in postwar despair, The Small Back Room is a tense study of a man facing his demons, as gripping in its bomb disposal scenes as anything in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008). The release of this new 4K restoration by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation coincides with the film’s 75th anniversary.

Where’s it on? Netflix

Arriving on Netflix after a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spell in cinemas, Hit Man is Richard Linklater’s tasty, outrageously entertaining new black comedy thriller about a college professor who moonlights for the New Orleans Police Department as a pretend hit man. Inspired by a Texas Monthly magazine article about the exploits of undercover operative Gary Johnson, it sees Glen Powell – the Linklater veteran who got wider attention as Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) – play the master of disguises whose job it is to trap individuals looking to hire a killer. Things become a lot more complicated – and fiction begins to take over fact – after he takes a liking to one potential client, Madison (Adria Arjona). He talks her out of her plans to kill her abusive husband, and they embark upon a steamy affair, in scenes that play like a delicious throwback to erotic thrillers of old. 

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

Criterion’s exquisitely designed box-set brings together three vital 1970s films by Ousmane Sembène, plugging a gaping hole in the availability of the work of this firebrand Senegalese filmmaker. Sembène was the director with a rebellious vision for an African cinema that would take its own path, away from Hollywood or European influence: “Europe is not my centre,” he famously said. The trio collected here – Emitaï (1971), Xala (1975) and Ceddo (1977) – are scorching critiques of different aspects of African society and the long shadow of colonial rule. Panoramic in their combined scope, they encompass righteous anger, thorny provocation and devilish satire; Xala is a comedy about erectile dysfunction that skewers Senegal’s business elite and the failures of its governing classes.