Pick of the week

Dead Man’s Wire

The spirit of the Al Pacino classic Dog Day Afternoon is alive and well in Gus Van Sant’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama. Both feature a desperate man driven to extremes, a frantic police operation to contain him and a 1970 media circus that creates an antihero. Bill Skarsgård is all gangly, edgy energy as Tony Kiritsis, a low-level Indianapolis land developer who believes mortgage broker ML Hall (Al Pacino in a superbly unlikable cameo) cheated him on a deal. So he takes Hall’s son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery), hostage using the titular contraption connected to a shotgun. It’s surprisingly funny amid the sweaty tension, with Kiritsis’s delusion that he’ll get away with the crime almost endearing.
Friday 5 June, 8am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

Propeller One-Way Night Coach

John Travolta’s drama is the definition of a vanity project. He wrote and directed it from his own children’s novel, as well as narrating, and it features members of his family. But there’s something cosily nostalgic about his stylishly retro tale, set in the golden age of air travel. It’s 28 December 1962, and Jeff (Clark Shotwell) and his actor mother (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) are flying TWA from New York to LA overnight. It’s an eye-opening experience for the eight-year-old on his first flight, with glamorous cabin crew, actual beds and “chicken cordon bleu”.
Out now, Apple TV

Ghost Trail

In 2016, a group of exiled Syrians in Europe are tracking down war criminals from the Assad regime. Hamid (Adam Bessa) thinks he has found one in Strasbourg, posing as a university chemistry student. But as he surveils him, Hamid’s increasing certainty that this was the state official who tortured him in prison bumps up against a lack of definitive proof. In Jonathan Millet’s slow-burning, fact-based French thriller, the hunt for justice is warped by obsession and PTSD, with Bessa taut and locked-down as the literature lecturer turned amateur secret agent.
Saturday 30 May, 9.05pm, BBC Four

The Nice Guys

This roisterous 2016 caper fits neatly into the sunny, starry, sleazy world of California crime fiction that gave us LA Confidential – and in lead Russell Crowe has a pleasing link to that film. But being a Shane Black movie, it’s also much funnier, with Crowe’s world-weary heavy-for-hire Jackson and Ryan Gosling’s bumbling private eye/single dad Holland a comic double act to cherish. The plot involves the death of a porn star and the search for a missing young woman (Margaret Qualley) in a wonderfully evoked 1970s Los Angeles of power, corruption and lies.
Sunday 31 May, 10.30pm, BBC One

Monolith

Matt Vesely’s indie sci-fi horror demonstrates how a good idea can outweigh a small effects budget. It’s shot entirely in one house with only one actor on screen, Lily Sullivan, who plays a sacked journalist reduced to doing a podcast about uncanny events. She comes upon the tale of a black brick that contains mysterious symbols and is linked to disturbing visions – and the more research she does, the weirder things become. So is it evidence of aliens or a metaphor for buried trauma?
Monday 1 June, 9pm, Film4

Devil in the Dust

This western is knocked off-kilter almost immediately when a cute little blond girl kills a horse by touching it. The supernatural frisson in Ned Crowley’s yarn never really goes away, as we follow Guy Pearce’s grizzled, ether-addicted doctor Bender, rancher Sarah (DeWanda Wise) and her aforementioned daughter (a deadpan Emily Ford, channelling Damien in The Omen) on a quest to a preacher who can supposedly take out the devil in her. An array of quirky supporting characters – including a Native American called William Shakespeare – keep the film on the lighter side of chilling.
Friday 5 June, Paramount+

Bring Them Down

A film possessing the relentlessness of tragedy, Chris Andrews’ dark rural drama takes two neighbouring Irish farming families, then watches as they destroy each other and themselves. Christopher Abbott’s shepherd Michael sets out for revenge when Jack (Barry Keoghan) – the son of his former girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) – steals two of his rams. We see their actions – and unforeseen consequences – successively from both men’s points of view, with Keoghan exceptional in being able to appear malevolent and innocent at the same time.
Friday 5 June, 11pm, BBC Two