Help yourself to seconds, or thirds of To Die For, Groundhog Day

IT'S not often in the same week we get two excellent films about TV weatherpersons.

Zhang Ziyi

IT'S not often in the same week we get two excellent films about TV weatherpersons. In this column's opinion, To Die For (Saturday, 4.55pm, Movie Greats) is the best thing Nicole Kidman has done.

Gus Van Sant's chilling satire on mainstream American values concerns a deluded TV weather girl who schemes and murders her way to the top in a frenzy of perverted ambition. "You're nothing in America unless you're on TV," coos Nicole's Suzanne Stone, the brightly chatty narrator of her own lethal quest for fame and fortune.

In Groundhog Day (Saturday, 11.40pm, Showtime Comedy), Bill Murray plays Phil, a TV weatherman sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. After his first night in the town Phil awakens to discover he's stuck in a time warp, doomed to spend the rest of his life repeating the same day over and over, getting thrown into jail and fruitlessly wooing his true love Rita (Andie MacDowell), before waking at 6am next morning to start all over again.

The title of Harold Ramis's ingenious fable has entered the language. And speaking of things that keep repeating, what about the endless cycle of Jane Austen adaptations that somehow caught on in the 1990s? Audiences couldn't get enough of Emma Woodhouse, Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Mr Darcy and the rest. Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park (Saturday, 8am, Movie Greats) takes one of the more problematic novels and draws on Austen's own letters and early journals to turn Fanny Price (Frances O'Connor) into a version of Austen. The background is a grim critique of 18th-century British imperialism, with frequent reminders that the genteel world of Mansfield Park was founded on the suffering of Antiguan slaves and that the business dealings of Sir Thomas Bertram (played by Harold Pinter, of all people) entailed rape and torture.

The Harry Potter films keep turning up with equal regularity. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (Sunday, 5.55pm, Movie One) is the sixth in the series and has all the expected virtues: beautifully accomplished magical effects, rich characters, gorgeous production values, much romantic business, even a coherent story. It's all about getting Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent, a wonderfully jovial presence) to return to Hogwarts as potions master and help solve the mystery of Voldemort's indestructibility.

The endless cycle of Jerry Bruckheimer action blockbusters yielded last year's effects-laden fantasy The Sorcerer's Apprentice (Saturday, 4.45pm, Movie One), released by the Disney studios to mark the 70th anniversary of their 1940 animated classic Fantasia (which contained a much-loved sequence about a sorcerer's apprentice who forgets a magic formula). The new film begins with the dying Merlin entrusting a magic ring to the care of his apprentice. The ring turns up in a New York antique shop in the year 2000, where it is discovered by Balthazar (Nicolas Cage). All this leads to another of those overblown and undisciplined spectacles that have given Hollywood summer blockbusters a bad name.

How many repeats will we see of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Saturday, 7.30pm, World Movies) before audiences tire of balletic, gravity-defying martial arts fantasies? Ang Lee's film looked wonderful when it first came out and fuelled a long-running Hollywood obsession with kung fu-related fight sequences and stories of warrior women.

Coco Avant Chanel (Saturday, 9am, Movie Two) is a deliciously stylish account of the rags-to-riches career and troubled love life of the great French fashion designer, played with beguiling charm by Audrey Tautou. The filmmakers seem to be saying: "Alors, Hollywood can turn out bumbling, costly movies like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but we'll show the world the essence of Gallic elegance and chic."

There's nothing chic about Bicycle Thieves (Saturday, 4pm, World Movies), Vittorio de Sica's heartbreaking story about a man's desperate search for his stolen bicycle. It is the most famous, and perhaps the greatest, example of Italian post-war neorealist cinema. Repeats can't come often enough. As for Random Harvest (Sunday, 10.15am and 6.15pm, TCM), the whole story is a repeat: a shell-shocked soldier (Ronald Colman) forgets about his wife (Greer Garson), who cares for him until an accident restores his memory. A beautiful, and unlikely, story.

Critic's choice
To Die For (M)
Saturday, 4.55pm, Movie Greats 4 stars
Mansfield Park (M)
Saturday, 8am, Movie Greats 3½ stars
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (PG)
Saturday, 7.30pm, World Movies 4 stars
Bicycle Thieves (PG)
Saturday, 4pm, World Movies 5 stars