Pick of the week
Riff Raff

There’s a distinct whiff of Fargo to Dito Montiel’s blood-flecked crime drama. We’ve got the seemingly ordinary family with secrets: Ed Harris’s Vincent, spouse Sandy (Gabrielle Union) and her nerdy teenage son DJ (Miles J Harvey). There are the disrupters: Vincent’s ex-wife Ruth (Jennifer Coolidge), their errant son Rocco (Lewis Pullman) and his girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini), who spark revelations about Vincent’s former life. And there are the comic-relief mob killers, nicely underplayed by Bill Murray and Pete Davidson. But it’s Coolidge who is the film’s trump card: funny, profane, horny – and wonderfully disinclined to take the revenge plot in any way seriously.
Sunday 21 September, Prime Video

ElioHe’s the alien ambassador! … Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio. Photograph: Pixar

The latest from the Pixar factory is another chipper animation, a sci-fi adventure that serves up big doses of Spielbergian wonder and DayGlo visuals. One other regular Spielberg theme – broken families – provides the emotional heart of the drama, as the titular hero, a lonely, 11-year-old orphan (Yonas Kibreab), dreams of finding extraterrestrial life. But then he is mistaken for Earth’s ambassador by a commonwealth of actual aliens, who need his help to negotiate with the warlike Lord Grigon. Luckily, Elio has made friends with Grigon’s neglected son, Glordon …
Out now, Disney+

The Night of the Shooting StarsMakes a lasting impression … The Night of the Shooting Stars. Photograph: TCD/Alamy

For a tale of wartime atrocities in occupied Italy in 1944, there’s a surprisingly playful tone to the Taviani brothers’ 1982 film. The inhabitants of a small Tuscan town decide to flee to the American side when they suspect the retreating German army are planning to massacre them. But their escape becomes an increasingly fable-like meander through a pastoral idyll of woods and wheatfields (and bomb craters), punctuated by tragicomic scenes of death. It’s a tough balance to maintain but the drama makes a lasting impression.
Saturday 20 September, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV

NovocaineAstoundingly grisly … Jack Quaid in Novocaine. Photograph: AP

Jack Quaid has experience of being put through the ringer in The Boys, but Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s comedic but astoundingly grisly thriller must be his most extreme role yet. His assistant credit union manager Nate has a congenital insensitivity to pain, which makes him wary of human contact – until the fellow employee he has fallen for, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), is taken hostage by bank robbers, transforming him into a have-a-go hero. Like Home Alone if the Wet Bandits couldn’t feel the blows, it’s a riot of slapstick violence.
Thursday 25 September, 9.20am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere & Paramount+

French LoverMeet cute … Sara Giraudeau and Omar Sy in French Lover. Photograph: Emmanuel Guimier/Netflix

Lisa-Nina Rives’ Paris-set romantic drama relies heavily on the charms of its male lead, Lupin’s Omar Sy, for its success. So there’s a sly irony that those same characteristics – embodied in his pampered film star Abel – don’t really work on the bar worker, Marion (Sara Giraudeau), he meets not-so-cutely. She has her own, unstarry problems, which means their union is a slow burner. But the reassuring narrative of the “boy meets girl” trope does kick in eventually, with Sy convincing as a self-obsessed but lovable actor.
Friday 26 September, Netflix

Seven PsychopathsKeeps you on your toes … Colin Farrell and Sam Rockwell in Seven Psychopaths. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Either a comic interrogation of his own desire to make violent dramas or an attempt to have his cake and eat it, Martin McDonagh’s bleak, chatty 2012 comedy concerns a Hollywood screenwriter, Marty (Colin Farrell), who is trying to pen a script called Seven Psychopaths. He’s encouraged by his best mate, dog kidnapper Billy (Sam Rockwell, who always seems to be having a great time), but soon finds fiction and real life overlapping. There’s a shaggy dog story quality to the film that keeps you on your toes, while Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson and Tom Waits add heft to the supporting cast.
Friday 26 September, 12.40am, Channel 4

The SouthernerField of dreams … Betty Field and Zachary Scott in The Southerner. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library /Alamy

The great French film-maker Jean Renoir’s sojourn in the US during the war resulted in six pictures, of which this 1945 rural drama is the most celebrated. Oddly, it’s a very American story, in which a Texas farm worker rents a piece of land to fulfil his dream of growing his own cotton. Zachary Scott and Betty Field give natural performances as the Tuckers who, along with their two young kids and grumpy granny, try to make the best of things despite a leaky house, sickness, hostile neighbours and one hell of a storm. A humanist paean to family and community.
Friday 26 September, 4am, Talking Pictures TV