Films of the week: Young romance blossoms in a Wes side story
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Moonrise Kingdom
2.05pm & 10.10pm Sky Movies Premiere
(Wes Anderson, 2012) Wes Anderson's typically idiosyncratic entry in the lovers-on-the-run genre is set in New England in 1965, steeped in oddly remembered nostalgia, and pits two wilful, reckless non-conformists against straight society. As ever, Anderson is on the side of the precocious, geeky and childlike: the runaways are only 12, but their love is no less deeply felt because of it. Bruce Willis, Edward Norton and Bill Murray star. ****
Saturday
Coriolanus
9.45pm BBC2
(Ralph Fiennes, 2011) Set in television studios and parliament buildings; amid public protests and bullet-scarred urban war-zones, Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut is a vigorous and highly cinematic contemporary staging of Shakespeare's lesser-known tragedy. He is also domineering and thunderous as the prideful eponymous army general, while Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox stand out amid an excellent supporting cast. ****
Monday
Undefeated
10.55pm Film4
(Dan Lindsay, TJ Martin, 2011) Undefeated is about a volunteer high-school football coach mentoring fatherless, underprivileged black boys in Memphis. And how, by instilling qualities such as discipline and co-operation, he is able to turn around not only their football season but their lives. A cross between Hoop Dreams and The Blind Side, it was a worthy – albeit predictable – winner of a Best Documentary Oscar in 2012. ****
Tuesday
Only Yesterday
12.55pm Film4
(Isao Takahata, 1991) Unlike the fantasies by Hayao Miyazaki, his partner at the head of the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata's films generally have a realistic setting – but are barely any less imaginative or lyrical. In this one, whose title translates literally as "Memories Like Falling Raindrops" a 27-year-old Tokyo salarywoman is visited by childhood memories while holidaying in the country. ****
Wednesday
Margaret
7.30pm Sky Movies Select
(Kenneth Lonergan, 2011) In one of the unfortunately rare films to give a teenage girl anything much of interest to think about, Anna Paquin plays a complex, contradictory and credible middle-class New York high-school student struggling to process the moral and legal ramifications of a traffic accident that she witnessed, and the knowledge that adults don't really understand how the world works either. *****
Thursday
One Mile Away
11.10pm Channel 4
(Penny Woolcock, 2012) Penny Woolcock's street-level documentary, which arises out of her less successful 2009 grime musical 1 Day, gives a voice to the handful of variously articulate and thoughtful gang-members who are determined to effect a peace process and end a pointless, decade-old postcode war between young black men in Aston and young black men one mile away in Handsworth, Birmingham. ****
Friday
Mean Streets
12.10am BBC2
(Martin Scorsese, 1973) Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro had each made films before, but it wasn't until their first collaboration that they announced their arrival as major talents – specifically, the moment when De Niro's small-time local hoodlum swaggers into a bar in New York's Little Italy in slow motion, to the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash". The whole of Mean Streets fizzes with similar energy and cool. *****
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