5 things to watch this weekend – 8 to 10 November

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide and BFI Player

What if there was a gang of West Coast surfers who were also bank robbers? And what if they wore rubber masks of Nixon, Reagan and other former presidents to disguise themselves? Then what if Keanu Reeves played an FBI agent going undercover to infiltrate the surfing crew? Bodacious! Sometimes all you need is to throw enough fun and unexpected elements together and a kind of movie magic happens. Let’s get Patrick Swayze in there too – he can play the gang leader, a mystic kind of dude. And let’s have Kathryn Bigelow directing it, catching a mighty wave in her ascendancy to the front ranks of Hollywood action auteurs. This highwater mark of 90s action cinema is back on the big screen.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Bird is the new film from director Andrea Arnold – a return of sorts to the British social realism of her film Fish Tank (2009) after working in period for Wuthering Heights (2011), in the US for American Honey (2016) and in documentary for Cow (2021). Newcomer Nykika Adams plays 12-year-old Bailey who is growing up in a squat with her loving but irresponsible dad Bug (Barry Keoghan), whose latest wheeze is harvesting toad slime for its hallucinogenic uses. The setting is northern Kent, where – out in the rural hinterlands near her estate – Bailey makes a mysterious new friend, a free-spirited wanderer called Bird (Franz Rogowski). Arnold’s film plays something like a modern spin on Whistle Down the Wind (1961) or The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), albeit with punkier energy and a soundtrack featuring Blur, Coldplay and Sleaford Mods.

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

Among the year’s most vital documentaries, No Other Land is the work of a Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective and their effort to record the encroaching destruction of a West Bank community’s homes by Israeli forces. The film premiered at Berlin back in February but comes to us now with all of its sense of urgency as an act of witness intact. The focus of the film is young lawyer and activist Basel Adra – one of the four credited directors – who began filming in 2019. Over four years, he captures the arrival of the bulldozers, confrontations between the villagers and the Israeli forces, and the forced displacement of the community. It’s passionate guerrilla filmmaking, with some startling footage shot on camera phones.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 22:00

Four Atlanta businessmen (including Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight) get together for a canoe trip up the fictional Cahulawassee River in this classic survival adventure from British director John Boorman. It’s a chance for male bonding and for the guys to reconnect with the American pioneering spirit and the conquest of the wilderness. But of course it all goes horribly wrong, as the quartet face both the perils of nature and unwanted attention from the locals. Boorman’s backwoods thriller was a sensation on release in 1972, with its ‘Dueling Banjos’ theme and that notorious “squeal like a pig” scene. More than 50 years on, it’s as haunting and resonant as ever – a vision of an older America being lost to the march of civilisation and development.

Where’s it on? Blu-ray

The young Harmony Korine had been noticed out skating by Larry Clark, who asked him to write a screenplay about skaters for the film that became Kids (1995). It led to the opportunity for Korine to make his own directorial debut – the raw, abrasive and totally unvarnished work of haunted American realism that is Gummo. Following the lives of two young feckless, opportunity-less friends in small-town Ohio, Gummo finds Korine turning the sentimental tropes of the coming-of-age story inside out in favour of a stark vision of late 20th-century alienation and deprivation. This roughest and most confrontational of debuts gets a pristine Criterion Blu-ray edition this week, which is what you call coming up in the world.