5 things to watch this weekend – 1 to 3 February

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Lee Chang-dong’s mysterious thriller-of-sorts Burning arrives in UK cinemas this week virtually smouldering with hype. It placed third in Sight & Sound magazine’s best films of 2018 poll – just one of enough accolades that they’ve spilled over to their own Wikipedia page.

It’s Lee’s first film since his profoundly moving decade-starter Poetry (2010), but this one finds the South Korean director working in a more sinister, unsettling register. There’s an air of suppressed violence and class rage throughout. Adapting a short story by cult Japanese author Haruki Murakami, things begin when a delivery man, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), falls for a woman who says she used to be his classmate. Their honeymoon-period proves short-lived, however, after the enigmatic Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) returns from a trip abroad with another man. Lee is soon forced to play third wheel to a man who is more confident than he is, more charismatic and far more affluent. He also has a taste for arson.

Where’s it on? Cinemas nationwide

Richard E. Grant’s jubilant reaction to his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor is incentive enough for Brits to get behind this one, but this true-life tale of author-turned-forger Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) and her boozehound companion (Grant) in 1980s New York deserves its plaudits. Struggling to make ends meet after her Estée Lauder biography flops, Israel finds a way to pay the bills by crafting and selling off fake literary letters by the likes of Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker.

McCarthy has her own Oscar nod for best actress for her fabulously lived-in performance: scabrous and often unlikeable, she brilliantly conveys the closed-in sadness of a prickly talent who’s spent a lifetime not being a people person. Though it offers much of the fun of a good caper movie, Marielle Heller’s film gets richer and more affecting than you expect. McCarthy and Grant make for a hilarious odd-couple double act, but the cold of its wintry setting cuts deep.

Where’s it on? BBC2, Sunday, 1.50pm

Powell & Pressburger’s peach of a fantasy from 1946 hinges on a bureaucratic glitch in the afterlife that accidentally gives a downed wartime pilot (David Niven) extra time on earth. Just time enough, in fact, to fall in love. It’s this inconvenient truth that gives the undead airman ammunition to mount his case for staying alive, after he’s hauled in front of a heavenly tribunal.

Merrily switching between a monochrome afterlife and an England in wet-paint Technicolor, A Matter of Life and Death has always been the kind of film you’d feel lucky to be sat in front of on a Sunday afternoon. But watched in February 2019, those celestial courtroom scenes take on an extra topicality as the clock counts down to Brexit, with Raymond Massey’s George Washington-era prosecutor weighing up the battered state of Britain’s relations with its foreign allies.

Where’s it on? Netflix

Movie types have really had it in for art-world types of late, puncturing their pretensions in everything from Nocturnal Animals (2016) to The Square (2017). People in glass houses probably shouldn’t be throwing stones, but now Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy has entered the fray not with stones but with… a velvet buzzsaw?

Fresh from Sundance and straight onto Netflix, this wacky, giallo-style mystery is set among the movers and shakers of LA’s modern-art scene and includes a deliciously campy turn from Jake Gyllenhaal as a polyamorous critic. Gilroy has said that he was aiming for an Altman-y ensemble piece, but that intention surely got lost in the post because the result is less Ready to Wear and more Ready to Die. Veering wildly from broad satire to grisly thrills, it harks back to 70s horrors like Theatre of Blood as it metes out gruesome ends to anyone profiting from a dead artist’s stash of mysteriously bleeding, Francis Bacon-like canvases. Very silly, but not without some fun.

Where’s it on? DVD/Blu-ray/streaming on BFI Player

Another Oscar hopeful, The Wife arrives for home viewing in time to catch up with Glenn Close’s hotly tipped performance ahead of this year’s ceremony. Like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, it’s also about literary fraud of a sort, with Jonathan Pryce playing an esteemed New England novelist who travels to Stockholm with his wife (Close) and son (Max Irons) after taking the call telling him he’s won the Nobel prize.

There are echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Wild Strawberries (1957) in the way this tale takes the measure of a man en route to an awards ceremony. But fellow Swede Björn Runge’s film neatly flips the focus to the accompanying spouse for a study of womanhood in the shadow. For a film about fine writing, there’s not as much nuance here as there could be, but see it for Close. In her finely calibrated turn, the snowballing resentment at her lifetime’s lot as a genius’s other half makes for absorbing drama. You’re there for every flinch, every bristle, every bit tongue.