Your night in: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated or slated
From a fast and loose action movie to an intriguing and sobering documentary, there’s some stellar viewing on TV tonight. Use our guide to decide what you’ll be watching.
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LUCY (MA15+)
***1/2
9.00pm Ch. 7
A fast and loose action movie hellbent on getting in your face and staying on your mind by any means necessary. Scarlett Johansson has the title role, and is can be her way, matter-of-factly steers it towards some frankly freak places. She plays an expat American student in Taiwan who has been commandeered as a drug mule by local traffickers. After the accidental intake of a dangerous new designer substance, Lucy’s brain capacity starts expanding at an exponential rate. The power unleashed by this ever-opening mind can manifest itself in ways which must be seen to be believed. And just as often, not believed. The only advice I can offer is to go with the gushing, exhilarating flow of it all, or drown in the backwash as this raging torrent of thrills, spills and ground-up pills surges forwards. Written and directed by Luc Besson (The Fifth Element).
THE A-TEAM (M)
***
8.30pm 7MATE
A bombastically mindless and rather fun rebooting of the 1980s TV show of the same name. Should come as no biggie surprise-wise then that the all-new The A-Team isn’t about to tamper with the same-old formula. Only now, the ex-Vietnam vets are ex-Iraq, and a little more self-serving than before. Story centres on a quartet of disgraced looking to clear their name while the Army and the CIA track their every move. The stunt work (whether CGI-assisted or not) is particularly impressive. If you are not punching the air at the sight of the A-Teamers operating an artillery tank while it plummets from a launch point just outside the planet’s atmosphere, you are just too hard to please. Stars Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper.
BLACK HAWK DOWN (MA15+)
****1/2
8.30PM GO!
Based on the best-selling book by Mark Bowden. A studied, sobering and numbingly no-holds-barred account of the battle of Mogadishu, a 1993 bloodbath in Somalia that became America’s worst skirmish since Vietnam. Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator) pares back story, character development and moral righteousness to their bare essentials, resulting in the most striking, if not revealing, portrait of modern warfare ever filmed. Stars Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore and Eric Bana (who more than holds his own in his American feature debut).
VERA DRAKE (M)
****
7.30PM WORLD MOVIES
In 1950 London, the family of an everyday housewife (deserving Oscar nominee Imelda Staunton) are devastated after learning of her secret sideline as an amateur abortionist. A high-quality drama which lays bare one of the great moral conundrums of our time, provoking much thought on the issue of terminated pregnancy without declaring how you should think.
THE PIANO (M)
*****
9.45PM WORLD MOVIES
The masterpiece for which acclaimed New Zealand writer-director Jane Campion will always be remembered. Never seen it? Enter this extraordinary experience as cold as possible. All you really need to know is that Ada (a brilliant performance from Holly Hunter) is a mute, unmarried Scottish mother in the 1800s. She has been promised in marriage on the other side of the world to a man she has never laid eyes on, a New Zealand settler named Stewart (Sam Neill). Ada gives vent to her singular sense of “will” through the way in which she plays her beloved piano. This mystical instrument becomes the centre of a bizarre love triangle when a bushman drifter, Baines (Harvey Keitel), encourages her musical desires against the wishes of her husband. Flawless filmmaking abounds throughout, building to a gripping climax that is impossible to forget.
MOVIE PICKS FOR STREAMING OR RENTAL
THE DEAD DON’T DIE (MA15+)
***
BINGE, FOXTEL
Welcome to Centerville. A sign as you enter town tells you it’s “a real nice place.” Now look once more at the title of this movie. Centerviille won’t have a hope in hell of keeping itself nice for much longer. Especially now that some newly zombie-fied former residents have returned, looking to pick up where they left off while still alive. Oh, and they’re rather hungry after taking that dirt nap, too. So begins a deliriously deadpan zom-com looking to have some smart fun at the expense of how dumb the whole zombie movie thing can be if you think mildly hard about it. While rarely staggering into the realm of the laugh-out-loud, the movie’s couldn’t-care-less cool about its silly subject never gets old. It doesn’t exactly hurt that director Jim Jarmusch has attracted an A-grade cast to this goofy B-movie, led by Bill Murray and Star Wars regular Adam Driver as Centerville’s best cops on the case. Co-stars set to chow down or be chomped include Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits and Selena Gomez.
HELL OR HIGH WATER (MA15+)
****1/2
SBS ON DEMAND
If you have never seen this recent classic (one of the best movies of 2016), then get across to SBS On Demand and witness its brilliance for free ASAP. On first appearances, Hell or High Water appears to be working with basic storytelling elements too tried and tested to carry our full attention for long. The setting is the far west of Texas, a dust bowl of dashed hopes and dirty back roads. The featured characters are two brothers (Ben Foster and Chris Pine) starting a career in armed robbery, and a veteran cop (a majestic Jeff Bridges) weeks away from retirement. And yet, in just minutes, a dynamic, transfixing spell is cast here that will not be broken. All by merely clearing a corner of the world that is not just there to be looked at, but lived in. Once lured there, you will regret ever having to leave. The relaxed redneck spirit of rural Texas so famously captured by No Country for Old Men is at work in a decidedly different and totally engrossing way here. Highly recommended.
THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS (M)
****
NETFLIX
An intriguing, sobering and compellingly strange slice of real life forms one of the best documentaries of recent years. It all starts with an incredible tale of coincidence that happened in the US in the early 1980s. Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman were born identical triplets some two decades earlier, only to be adopted out by a young mother not capable of raising them. By the slimmest of chances, the brothers accidentally found one another as adults, and from that moment on, were inseparable. The world’s media couldn’t get enough of the yarn, and the trio parlayed their fame into a successful New York restaurant. All of this alone would make for a cracking doco. But there is more. So much more. The upbeat coincidence of the siblings’ chance reunion is gradually overshadowed by the possibility there was nothing coincidental about their separation at birth. If you don’t know what happened, keep it that way until you see this remarkable investigative work.
Originally published as Your night in: Every movie on Melbourne TV tonight rated or slated