Films of the week: Scenes from a rock marriage in tragic decline
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Control
1.15am Film4
(Anton Corbijn, 2007) Artfully composed, still and shot in a luminous but textured black-and-white, this is the rock biopic as Bergman-esque study of marital failure, depression and the disintegration of the psyche. Sam Riley plays Ian Curtis, and is so good that you entirely forget it isn't the Mancunian post-punk himself staring back out of the screen at you. *****
Saturday
To Catch a Thief
1.05pm More 4
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) One of Hitchcock's lighter-weight but most sparkling crime capers, To Catch a Thief is set on the French Riviera and has Cary Grant as a debonair retired jewel thief who is suspected of being up to his old tricks by Grace Kelly's flighty socialite, and must catch the real perpetrator in order to clear his name and retain her affections. ****
Sunday
The Social Network
9pm Channel 4
(David Fincher, 2010) A work of recent social history with a very witty, typically rat-a-tat script by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network dramatises the origins of Facebook in the 2003 Harvard dorm room of its founder: the prickly, intellectually disdainful, single-minded and – by the end of the film – friendless 19-year-old undergraduate, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). ****
Monday
I'm Not Scared
1.50am Film4
(Gabriele Salvatores, 2003) In Seventies rural southern Italy, a nine-year-old discovers a boy of the same age in a hole in the ground; and a little later, the kidnappers who put him there. With a fluid cinematic classicism, this painterly, vivid and yet oblique crime drama, from the director of Mediterraneo, gets across some of the strangeness of the adult world as it is seen by children. Giuseppe Cristiano stars. ****
Tuesday
Funny Face
12.40Pm Film4
(Stanley Donen, 1957) A brightly coloured musical, with songs by the Gershwins and choreography by Fred Astaire. Audrey Hepburn plays a bookish salesgirl who is discovered by Astaire's fashion photographer, but only agrees to model for him after she is whisked away to Paris for a dalliance with Sartre in Montmartre, and the power of romance, song and dance triumphs over dry philosophising. ****
Thursday
Risky Business
12.20am Sky Movies Greats
(Paul Brickman, 1983) The film that launched Tom Cruise's career is one of the smarter and more idiosyncratic teen films of the Eighties; a mixture of brash comedy and stark, anti-capitalist satire, in which he plays a privileged but callow 17-year-old coming of age while his parents are out of town, having hastily entered a business arrangement with a prostitute (Rebecca De Mornay). ****
Friday
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
10.35pm ITV
(Shane Black 2005) Shane Black's high-concept action-movie scripts made him the hottest property in Hollywood for much of the Nineties. Until Iron Man 3, however, the only one he'd also directed was this self-aware and witty crime caper. Robert Downey Jr's wiseass professional thief gets mixed up in a murder mystery, and Val Kilmer has fun with his role as a gay private eye. ****
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