TV Entertainment News

Film picks: The Serpent | Gosford Park | The Doors

The Serpent
12.40pm & 7.55pm, Sky Movies Indie
(Eric Barbier, 2006)

Based on a novel by Ted "Get Carter" Lewis and transposed to Paris, this has a well-to-do photographer (Yvan Attal) persecuted by a psychopathic former schoolmate (Clovis Cornillac) who is nursing a deep grudge. Attal's life crumbles in a welter of rape and murder accusations; all very entertaining, but it lacks the subtleties of Guillaume Canet's recent, similarly themed Tell No One.

Gosford Park
9pm, More4
(Robert Altman, 2001)

Murder in a stately country pile in England, circa 1932: the setting is pure Agatha Christie, but for Altman the whodunnit is less important than the characters above and below stairs. The screen glows with excellence, from the impeccable performances (Helen Mirren and all) to Andrew Dunn's cinematography and Julian Fellowes' acerbically literate script. A riveting, multi-layered production from a master.

The Doors
12.45am, Sky Movies Drama
(Oliver Stone, 1991)

Oliver Stone flings open the doors of perception on to 60s rock legend Jim Morrison. Val Kilmer is the singer-cum-mystic poet, notorious for lewd acts on and off stage, and for a relentless appetite for drugs and booze that left him dead at 27. Meg Ryan plays his long-suffering girlfriend, Pamela Courson.