Piece By Piece to Saltburn: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

We've had Robbie Williams played by a CGI chimp so why not Pharrell Williams as a collection of small plastic bricks? This weird but joyous documentary from Morgan Neville uses Lego to encapsulate the life of the wildly successful Neptunes producer and musician. Williams having synaesthesia – he experiences sound as colour – means the film can go off on visual flights of fancy; the beats he creates becoming rainbow fireworks or vibrant waves. All this trippy imagery covers up the fact that his rise to stardom has been fairly frictionless, but contributions from Lego versions of Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg et al attest to his offbeat worldview and hyperactive creativity.
Saturday, 8.25am, 4.20pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Why would a mother leave her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to drown? That's the central question in French film-maker Alice Diop's murky, moving courtroom drama, as a young Senegalese woman, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), is put on trial. Lecturer Rama (Kayije Kagame) attends in the hope of writing a book about it, but uneasy resonances with her own life – immigrant family, pregnancy, mixed-race relationship – throw her off-track. Even the evasive, inconsistent Laurence appears unsure as to why she committed such a horrific act. Saturday, 9pm, BBC Four
An unusual romantic lead at the best of times, Humphrey Bogart really pushed the boat out in terms of audience sympathy in this 1950 Nicholas Ray film. His Hollywood screenwriter Dixon Steele is sardonic and bitter, with a history of getting into fights. And when he is suspected of the murder of a hat-check girl, his blithe indifference raises the hackles of the cops. That doesn't stop new neighbour Laurel (a superb Gloria Grahame) falling for him, but as she gets to know Dixon better her suspicions rise. An edgy mystery, with Bogart an opaque, menacing presence. Sunday, 2pm, Talking Pictures TV
Celebrated for making stars of John Wayne and its chief location, Monument Valley, John Ford's 1939 film also showed that the western could allow for moral complexity in between shootouts. With renegade Apache Geronimo on the warpath, an assortment of ill-matched passengers find themselves on a dangerous journey. These include Wayne's escaped convict, a sex worker, a drunken doctor, a cavalry officer's wife and a thieving bank manager. Naturally, the rough and ready types prove more reliable than their social betters when push comes to shove. Sunday, 12.45pm, 5Action
Just in case the upcoming Netflix sequel doesn't quite live up to expectations, here's Adam Sandler's 1996 slapstick comedy to prove where most of its best jokes originated. Sandler's Happy is a dreadful ice-hockey player with a hair-trigger temper but he possesses a stupendously hard shot, which when adapted to the game of golf proves an unlikely boon. The disconnect between the etiquettes of the two sports is fertile ground for laughs, as is Sandler's man-child shtick. Sunday, 9pm, Comedy Central
Writer-director Emerald Fennell has her gateau and eats it in this dark comedy thriller, satirising the British aristocracy while revelling in their massive houses and insouciant confidence. Barry Keoghan is the cuckoo in the gilded nest, Oxford undergrad Oliver, who is befriended by the genial, upper-class Felix (Jacob Elordi) and taken home to the country pile to meet his folks, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and Sir James (Richard E Grant). The subsequent intrigue and flagrant rug-pulling as Oliver struggles to fit in make for a vivacious, vicious experience. Sunday, 10.30pm, BBC One
This limber 2015 film is the second of four fruitful collaborations (to date) between director Ryan Coogler and actor Michael B Jordan – and also set in train a new run of boxing dramas set in RockyWorld. Jordan plays Adonis Johnson, the unknown son of Rocky Balboa's opponent turned friend Apollo Creed. Adonis has the fight gene too, so turns up in Philadelphia to get Rocky (a convincingly weary Sylvester Stallone) to train him. There's enough ring work for the action fan, but it's also an exploration of family ties and the meaning of legacy. Tuesday, 9pm, ITV4

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Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

Want a pay rise? Take this French writer's hilarious advice

Georges Perec was attracted by formal challenges to writing: his most famous achievement was his novel La Disparition, written without using the letter 'e' once. (This is particularly hard in French, but the late Gilbert Adair managed to translate it into English, under the title A Void.) There was serious intent behind this; it was an echo of the Nazis' efforts to remove every single Jew from Europe. (In the case of Perec's mother, as well as about six million others, they succeeded.) The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is much more light-hearted, but is still the result of an act of literary restriction: an attempt to mimic, in prose, the recursive nature of a flow chart. First published in 1968, this delightfully unclassifiable text, now reissued by Verso, is short and exhausting, and features no capital letters, punctuation (apart from dashes), inverted commas or any other of the normal accoutrements of the printed page. In short, it looks like this: it is never very wise to approach a line manager at a time when his gastric functions are likely to overshadow the professional and managerial capacities associated with his hierarchical rank it is far better to go see him in the morning but what the hell he himself told you to come see him at 2.30 pm you have to take life as it comes so now it is 2.30 pm and you go to see mr x … and so on. I could have stopped anywhere. You can either put up with this kind of thing or you can't, but once you slip into its rhythms, it becomes both beguiling and hilarious (although you wouldn't really want it any longer.) For me it recalls Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, or some of the madder expressions of Beckett's prose works (and Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot); or indeed, Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel, a similarly unpunctuated and lower-case text. There's something about this style which is particularly suited to the downtrodden, and in my experience there are few more miserable and downtrodden people than office workers. It first appeared in the journal Enseignement programmé, which was devoted to exploring computer programming (in those days, still in its youth); as it happened, Perec's day job was as a lowly information storage and retrieval technician, grade IIIB, which meant, as Bellos notes in his introduction, 'his prospects of getting a raise were quite as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.' And yet there's a kind of insane but helpless cunning behind his efforts: which day would be best to ask? (None of them, of course.) Look at the cafeteria menu, Perec says. Is fish being served? Then be careful, for your line manager may have swallowed a fish bone and be 'in a really awful mood'. Bellos uses the word 'circumperambulate' to describe the futile odyssey you must make around the building to find out where 'he' is; he seems at times as elusive as Godot himself. When he does call you into his office 'abandon all rancour and refrain from observing [that] … he could have bloody well given you an appointment three weeks ago'. You know the protagonist will exhaust all the possibilities of the flow chart and still not get his raise; it would, of course, destroy the comedy if he did. Even in the 1960s, people were becoming uneasy about the prospect of losing their jobs to computers; Perec's own job was one of the more fragile canaries in that particular coalmine. So this book, although describing a world from over half a century ago, still rings true: not only do we have the eternal dehumanised tedium of the office, which has been evoked ever since offices were invented (think of Dickens's worn-out clerks, or Melville's rebellious Bartleby), but the long shadow of the algorithm. 'It would have been nice,' says Bellos wistfully at one point, 'to translate this text without apostrophes either, which are not needed in French, but that might have tried readers' patience a little too much.' He acknowledges that the text is 'quite unreadable in the ordinary way', and you could say that now that I have given you the gist, I have spared you the task of reading the book yourself. But there is something delightful about its intent, a sympathetic humanity which is deliberately at odds with the relentless, machine-like persistence of the prose. It's a text that repays attention, and is timeless.

The Independent

an hour ago

• The Independent

Paris' iconic cauldron from the Olympic Games returns to light up summer nights

A year after it captivated crowds during the Paris Olympics, a centerpiece of the summer Games is making a comeback. The iconic helium-powered balloon that attracted myriads of tourists during the summer Games has shed its Olympic branding and is now just called the 'Paris Cauldron.' It is set to rise again into the air later Saturday, lifting off over the Tuileries Garden. Around 30,000 people are expected to attend the launch, which coincides with France's annual street music festival — the Fete de la Musique, the Paris police prefecture said. And it won't be a one-time event. After Saturday's flight, the balloon will lift off into the sky each summer evening from June 21 to Sept. 14, for the next three years. The cauldron's ascent may become a new rhythm of the Parisian summer, with special flights planned for Bastille Day on July 14 and the anniversary of the 2024 opening ceremony on July 26. Gone is the official 'Olympic' branding — forbidden under IOC reuse rules — but the spectacle remains. The 30-meter (98-foot) -tall floating ring, dreamed up by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur and powered by French energy company EDF, simulates flame without fire: LED lights, mist jets and high-pressure fans create a luminous halo that hovers above the city at dusk, visible from rooftops across the capital. Though it stole the show in 2024, the cauldron was only meant to be temporary, not engineered for multi-year outdoor exposure. To transform it into a summer staple, engineers reinforced it. The aluminum ring and tether points were rebuilt with tougher components to handle rain, sun and temperature changes over several seasons. Though it's a hot-air-balloon-style, the lift comes solely from helium — no flame, no burner, just gas and engineering. The structure first dazzled during the Olympics. Over just 40 days, it drew more than 200,000 visitors, according to officials. Now anchored in the center of the drained Tuileries pond, the cauldron's return is part of French President Emmanuel Macron's effort to preserve the Games' spirit in the city, as Paris looks ahead to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Daily Mail​

2 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

Claudia Winkleman looks worlds away from her usual self as she ditches her trademark heavy eyeliner after surgery

Claudia Winkleman looked worlds away from her usual self as she shared a makeup free photo after an eye operation on Friday. The TV presenter, 53, ditched her trademark eyeliner for a photo with her doctor Julian Stevens following the procedure. The Traitors host told how she wouldn't be able to wear her beloved eye makeup for a few weeks and also has to sleep with goggles on. She wrote: 'This amazing human makes me see. He's operated on my eyes before and he did it again today. No eyeliner for weeks and I sleep in goggles (no words) but I'm eternally grateful. 'Do NOT zoom in on my left eye - it's wonky. Thank you Julian. I paid for the treatment, this isn't an ad. I just love him. 'It's very possible I'm still a bit sedated. Night, night.' It comes just days after Claudia's mother mother Eve Pollard poked fun at her famous daughter's 'orange face'. During an appearance on Vanessa Feltz 's Channel 5 show on Monday the author, 81, revealed that the Strictly host uses her fake tan and lashings of mascara as a 'uniform'. Host Vanessa, 63, described Claudia's look as the 'most frequently discussed make-up in this country' to which Eva cheekily asked: 'The orange face?'. The TV star's kooky eye make-up and fringe was also brought up and her mum said: 'It's a uniform I think it's a funny way it is.' 'I think she's come across it, she didn't start like that and it's a uniform and it suits her and it works and that's it. It makes life simple for her'. Eve went on to reveal her daughter does at times try a more subdued appearance when not on air, but said the trademark look was now 'part of who Claudia Winkleman is'. Claudia previously revealed she has turned to two household items back when she was first trying to achieve her 'orange' complexion. The presenter used Bisto gravy granules and her friends' reused tea bags instead of fake tan. Claudia appeared on Radio Four's Women's Hour with Emma Barnett when she confessed to the bizarre beauty hack. Discussing what they do with tea bags once they've made cups of tea, Claudia revealed one her friends at university used to put them in ramekin so they could use them later as a self tanner. 'I'm going back to university here, when everything was reused, and I mean everything.' While Emma suggested a tea bag could be reused for their next brew, the Strictly presenter added: 'Or fake tan because I've done that before.' As Emma was stunned, Claudia elaborated: 'Of course I have, and Bisto, listen needs must, needs must.' Claudia said she puts her old tea bags in the sink which drives her husband Kris 'mad'. She previously confessed her tan is so thick she has to scour it off with a kitchen sponge. If you use the amount of spray tan I do, you need to scour it off with a kitchen utensil,' she revealed on the In The Bathroom beauty video blog. 'If you were using a Dulux colour chart, if there was one on there that said tangerine, right at the bottom, the one where you say, 'That's going to be too much for our walls', it's not too much for me. Put it on.' She said her addiction to tanning started while she was a History of Art student at New Hall College, Cambridge. She said: 'I'd rented a sunbed for a whole term in tiny halls of residence … it was so unhealthy when I think back now.'