London, Europe Brief News – To help, we’ve plucked out the five best films to be streamed this weekend on TV.
The King’s Man
The first of Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman movies was an unexpected treat; a big, fun, surprisingly moving Marvel-does-Bond rollercoaster. Interest waned, however, with 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a film so incoherent it appeared to have been assembled at speed by idiots.
The newest offering, The King’s Man, is something of a soft reset. It’s a prequel, charting Ralph Fiennes’ Zelig-style journey through the events that led to world war one. There’s a lot of fun spotting all the real-life historical figures dotted throughout the mayhem. Rhys Ifans, for one, appears to be having the time of his life as Rasputin. A ridiculous Kingsman v Hitler sequel awaits.
Collateral
Michael Mann’s 2004 thriller deserves recognition not only for its pioneering cinematography – shot overwhelmingly on digital before the technology was perfected, Collateral has a gritty, pixellated immediacy – but for Tom Cruise’s white-hot thermite performance. As hired assassin Vincent, tasked with forcing nervous taxi driver Jamie Foxx to chauffeur him around Los Angeles for a night, this is Cruise using his intensity for bad rather than good for once. His shark-like evil sits in heavy contrast to the woozy, insomniac sprawl of the city around him.
Sorry We Missed You
Ken Loach’s most recent film aired in 2019, before the pandemic, but it only gained urgency in the intervening years. One of his angriest films in decades, it depicts the dire working conditions doled out to professional delivery drivers: zero-hour contracts, heavy rental fees, no insurance. The toll all this takes on Kris Hitchen’s lead character is abominable. Can a project like this change the employment policies of a notoriously shoddy industry? Probably not. But once seen, you’ll never take a delivery driver for granted again.
You’re Next
Thanks to the commercial success of last year’s Godzilla vs Kong, Adam Wingard now firmly has his feet under the Hollywood table. But whatever he chooses to do next, it’s unlikely to better the panache of his 2011 break-out hit You’re Next. The joy of this cheap, grimy slasher movie is in how lightly it wears its premise. In any other hands, a story like this – about intruders in animal masks systematically offing a group of semi-likable victims – would be a gruesome sludge of a thing. Wingard, though, fills the movie with endless wit, black humour and wild invention. Beautiful.
The Pit and the Pendulum
Although not one for Edgar Allan Poe purists, there’s still an astonishing amount of fun with Roger Corman’s 1961 adaptation. At its centre is an unhinged turn by Vincent Price as a castle-owning weirdo with a torture device in his basement. The entire performance is one long I-can’t-believe-they’re-letting-me-do-this wink to the audience, but the magic thing is that it stops just short of undermining the scares. When this film stands to attention, it has moments of pure terror.
