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IN The Bucket List, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two men diagnosed with cancer who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.

The Bucket List

IN The Bucket List (Monday, 8.30pm, Nine), Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play two men diagnosed with cancer who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.

Freeman's character, Carter Chambers, starts making a bucket list - all the things one should do before kicking the bucket. Looking at a majestic landscape, kissing the most beautiful girl in the world, getting a tattoo, drag-racing in a vintage Mustang, and so on.

Some of us may have different choices, and I suspect my own list wouldn't make much of a movie. But when at last we embark on our global travelogue of thrills, spills and famous inspiring vistas, this hefty slab of sentimental hokum soon gets us in.

The characters are appealing, and Rob Reiner directs with all the practised efficiency we expect from the man who gave us Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally.

Knowing (Saturday, 8.30pm, 7Mate) is a brilliant science-fiction thriller with apocalyptic overtones - gripping and intelligent, and all of it achieved without gross horror effects or mindless violence. You could almost call it an Australian film.

It was shot in Melbourne, the director is the Egyptian-born, Sydney-based Alex Proyas (I, Robot), and most of the cast is Australian, with the exception of Nicolas Cage, who plays an astrophysics professor decoding disaster messages found in an old time capsule.

"This heat we're experiencing isn't going to get any better," one character observes, and we get the message. The climactic scenes of Armageddon beat anything in Deep Impact. The final message may be trite, even corny, but Knowing would be pretty well unbearable without it. A truly haunting and frightening film.

For French filmmakers, accustomed to modest budgets, Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (Friday, 8.40pm, SBS Two) and its sequel Manon des Sources (10.50pm) must have seemed like Hollywood-style extravagance in the 1980s, their combined budget being roughly eight times the cost of the average French picture. The two films, shot back to back, were among the most popular made in France, and hailed across the world as a landmark achievement.

Based on a novel by Marcel Pagnol, this engrossing family saga gives us Yves Montand as an imperious local landowner at war with his neighbour (Gerard Depardieu), a hunchbacked former tax collector who refuses to share the water from a spring on his land.

One of the first and best of many inspirational teacher movies, To Sir, with Love (Saturday, 3pm, ABC1) stars Sidney Poitier as an engineer from British Guiana who can't find work in his field because he is black. He takes a job in a slum school in London's East End, teaching from experience instead of relying on textbooks, and wins the trust and affection of the kids.

Poitier's performance has an almost mythic quality, and the title song became a hit in 1967.

BEST ON SHOW

Knowing  (M)
4 stars
Saturday, 8.30pm, 7Mate

Jean de Florette (M)
4 stars
Friday, 8.40pm, SBS Two

To Sir, with Love (PG)
3 stars
Saturday, 3pm, ABC1