Left-Handed Girl to After the Hunt: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

Pick of the weekLeft-Handed Girl Shih-Ching Tsou is a regular collaborator of Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of Anora. He returns the compliment here by co-writing and editing her vibrant debut solo feature, where his interest in the least privileged members of society mingles fruitfully with her intimate focus on her Taiwanese homeland. Janel Tsai plays Shu-Fen, single mother to left-handed five-year-old I-Jing (a delightful Nina Ye) and stroppy young adult I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma). They arrive in Taipei to open a noodle stall but financial and relationship stresses threaten to unravel the family. An unforced, perceptive and utterly beguiling drama.Friday 28 November, Netflix *** After the Hunt It’s a rare Julia Roberts film where we don’t witness her trademark 100-watt grin, but laughs are in short supply in Luca Guadagnino’s murky Yale-set drama. Roberts plays the largely unlikable Alma, a philosophy professor up for tenure alongside her colleague and close friend Hank (Andrew Garfield). That is until student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses him of sexual assault. Questions of privilege, feminism, restorative justice and generational ignorance swirl round Alma as she is asked to choose who to believe – while her own conduct also comes up for debate. Out now, Prime Video *** One Shot With Ed Sheeran Adolescence director Philip Barantini adapts his single-take expertise to the rather less zeitgeisty subject of the Suffolk-raised, world-conquering singer. It’s an uncut hour or so of the amiable Ed playing the wandering troubadour in New York – guitar-slinging and singing at a marriage proposal, birthday party, a pub session and on an open-top tourist bus and subway train. Mild crowd disturbances ensue, while nifty camerawork (at one point it switches from a handheld view to a skyscraping drone shot) enlivens the procession of singalong hits. Out now, Netflix *** Nights of Cabiria One of several classic films by Federico Fellini that encompass both the high life and the low life of his beloved Rome, this 1957 comedy-drama stars Giulietta Masina as sex worker Cabiria. A little bundle of anger and (possibly naive) optimism, she absorbs whatever life throws at her – whether that’s on the nighttime streets or in a film star’s bedroom, meeting a charitable stranger or a man who may make an honest woman of her. Masina’s Chaplin-esque stylings lend the piece an achingly tragicomic aura. Saturday 22 November, 9.05pm, Talking Pictures TV *** The Barefoot Contessa The very first scene in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1954 film is the funeral of the titular movie star. So tragedy is baked into a cynical drama in which Spanish nightclub dancer turned Hollywood icon Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) is seen through the eyes of the men who help or hinder her. Humphrey Bogart is at his world-weary best as director Harry, while PR man Oscar (Edmond O’Brien) and Italian count Vincenzo (Rosanno Brazzi) also recall their time with an ultimately unknowable woman. Sunday, 2.55pm, Sky Arts *** C’mon C’mon A film that slowly digs its emotional claws into you, Mike Mills’s tender black-and-white drama is blessed with terrific performances from Joaquin Phoenix as radio producer Johnny and Woody Norman as his nephew Jesse. They are thrown together when the boy’s mum Viv (the ever empathetic Gaby Hoffmann) has to leave suddenly to look after Jesse’s bipolar dad. There’s a lot of humour to be mined in the imaginative nine-year-old’s direct line in questioning, while Johnny uses his mic as a private diary to ponder his inadequate parental skills and strained relationship with his sister. Wednesday 26 November, 2am, Channel 4 *** Inglourious Basterds “Once upon a time … in Nazi-occupied France.” Quentin Tarantino’s first stab at a war film is, as you’d expect, not overly based in reality. A reboot of The Dirty Dozen welded on to a counterfactual revenge fable (the ending is the height of wish-fulfilment), it features Brad Pitt as the leader of an off-the-books unit of Jewish American soldiers wreaking bloody havoc on the Germans. Mélanie Laurent plays a Paris cinema owner who spies the chance for payback after her family is murdered by Christoph Waltz’s “Jew hunter” SS officer. Silly, violent fun. Thursday 27 November, 9pm, Film4