A cut above, without the extras

MOST director's cuts are marketing exercises and include material dropped from a film's original release print. The result isn't always an improvement.

Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

MOST director's cuts are marketing exercises and include material dropped (often quite sensibly) from a film's original release print. The result isn't always an improvement.

In Apocalypse Now Redux, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola managed to add the best part of an hour to the original running time, with no noticeable gain in quality. The good thing about Alien: The Director's Cut (Sunday, 6.30pm, M Masterpiece) is that it comes in 44 seconds shorter and offers some notable new footage, including a chilling scene showing the cocooned figure of Dallas (Tom Skerritt).

Whatever version you watch, Ridley Scott's film is a classic of the sci-fi horror genre, haunting and beautiful, with startling production design and a career-altering role for Sigourney Weaver.

I can't recall a director's cut of a Stanley Kubrick film. Kubrick was the kind of meticulous craftsman determined to get things right the first time, and generally succeeded. But although he insisted on unfettered artistic control of his films, he was still subject to studio pressure.

Confronted with lukewarm audience reactions to the first screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Sunday, 10.30pm, TCM), he was persuaded to trim about 20 minutes from the original.  Conversations between the astronauts played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood aboard their Jupiter-bound spacecraft (soon to be hijacked by HAL the computer) were sacrificed, and the footage has been lost forever.

I'd give anything to see it now. Critics' polls regularly rank 2001 among the dozen greatest films of all time.

Thirty-one years after its release, and a few weeks before his death in 1999, Kubrick completed Eyes Wide Shut (Saturday 11pm, M Masterpiece), his last film and perhaps his strangest and most personal. Four years in the making, it was a typically furtive Kubrick enterprise, with nearly two years' shooting under tight security at studios in England.

The screenplay, a collaboration between Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle, concerns a wealthy New York doctor (Tom Cruise) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) whose sexual indiscretions at a lavish party lead to a complex study of infidelity, in which Kubrick explores ever-deepening layers of restlessness and erotic response.

A Royal Affair (Tuesday, 8.30pm, M Masterpiece), a Swedish-Danish co-production directed by Nicolaj Arcel, is the story of Christian VII (Mikkel Folsgaard), king of Denmark in the late 18th century, a mentally disturbed and deeply unhappy young man whose powers were usurped by a German physician, Johann Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen). A brilliant study of power play and sexual intrigue, this handsome and bracingly intelligent film is among the best period dramas I've seen.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

2001: A Space Odyssey (G)
5 stars
Sunday, 10.30pm, TCM

Alien: The Director's Cut (M)
4 stars
Sunday, 6.30pm, M Masterpiece

A Royal Affair (M)
4 stars
Tuesday, 8.30pm, M Masterpiece