Malkovich perfectly cast in film of Coetzee’s Disgrace

Race, class, history and sex are all fuel to the fire in an adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace.

John Malkovich and Jessica Haines in Disgrace, a strong, perceptive, old-school art-house film.

Director Steve Jacobs’s 2008 Australian-produced drama Disgrace (Sunday, midnight, ABC) never really received its due theatrically. A strong, perceptive, old-school art-house picture, it stars John Malkovich as a foppish yet morally dissolute academic in Cape Town, whose visit to his daughter’s remote farm results in chaos and tragedy. The strong script was adapted by Jacobs’s partner Anna-Maria Monticelli from JM Coetzee’s tough, Booker Prize-winning novel. Malkovich is typically eccentric yet completely focused, rendering his character a lightning rod for frictions involving race, class, history and sex.

None of Disgrace takes place in Australia, but it doesn’t pretend to; the same can’t be said for large chunks of the 1944 RKO war picture Marine Raiders (Tuesday, 1.40am, 7Two), in which Robert Ryan plays a captain on R and R in Californ … er, Australia, who falls in love with a Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force officer (Ruth Hussey). There’s no pretence to authenticity, but the film is of interest for the atmospheric photography, particularly during the night-time battle scenes, of cameraman Nick Musuraca.

Another vintage, good-looking Hollywood production worth the time (or the time-shift) is cinematographer turned director Rudolph Mate’s 1950 tear-jerker No Sad Songs for Me (Monday, 2.53am, ABC). Margaret Sullavan, in her last starring role, plays a midwestern American wife and mother who, on learning she’s dying of cancer, encourages her cheating husband (Wendell Corey) to bring his mistress (Viveca Lindfors) into their home to provide stability for their 11-year-old daughter (Natalie Wood). Sullavan received deserved praise for her noble performance, and Mate went from this to D.O.A.

For those still on the war jag, director Kathryn Bigelow’s absorbing, controversial 2012 thriller Zero Dark Thirty (Saturday, 8.30pm, SBS) stars Jessica Chastain as a composite and thus fictional CIA analyst whose tenacity results in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Screenwriter Mark Boal based the film on the real-life existence of such an analyst co-ordinating the raid, and Bigelow — as fine a pure action director as is currently working — ratchets the tension to an extraordinary degree.

Fans familiar with the work of pioneering contemporary documentarian Errol Morris were not surprised when he turned his camera on a former beauty pageant queen who, in the 1970s, was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a US Mormon missionary. The case provided such lurid fodder for the sleazier newspapers and magazines of the day that there was only one title Morris could use for his film: Tabloid (Tuesday, 2.15am, SBS). This is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of human strangeness that drew a lawsuit against Morris from his subject, which she lost. Only in America.

Zero Dark Thirty (M)

4 stars

Saturday, 8.30pm, SBS

Disgrace (M)

4 stars

Sunday, midnight, ABC

Tabloid (M)

3.5 stars

Tuesday, 2.15am, SBS