Pick of the week
The Mandalorian and Grogu
With one of the best Star Wars series going feature-length, its biggest draw, "Baby Yoda", rightly shares top billing with Pedro Pascal's perma-helmeted bounty hunter. Otherwise, it's business as usual for the grumpy Mando and his cute, Force-friendly ward as they get involved in a spot of Hutt family politics. Hired by the New Republic to track down a warlord still sympathetic to the old empire, they must deal with Jabba the Hutt's siblings, who want the return of their abducted nephew Rotta (Jeremy Allen White) in exchange for information. Featuring a bizarre cameo from Martin Scorsese as a multi-limbed food truck cook, Jon Favreau's sci-fi adventure is a light, lithe addition to the canon.
Out now, Disney+
A double-bill tribute to the late Dolly Parton includes Seriously Red, a romcom about a Dolly impersonator, but the real McCoy is here in Herbert Ross's 1989 weepie. The drama revolves round a Louisiana beauty parlour run by Parton's plain-talking Truvy, where a group of close female friends gather to gossip, mark major life changes and set the world to rights. The prime movers are Julia Roberts as bride-to-be Shelby and Sally Field as her mother M'Lynn, but Shirley MacLaine sweeps all before her as the gloriously sour Ouiser (try saying it out loud).
Sunday 6 September, 6.40pm, Film4
Imitation of Life
Douglas Sirk's 1959 melodrama is remarkable in that it bats around a number of knotty, topical questions about racism, sexism and class but is also a powerfully intimate drama about the bond between two mothers and their daughters. Lana Turner headlines as actor Lora, whose independent spirit leads to theatre fame, despite being a single parent to Sandra Dee's Susie. But it's the other pairing that provides the main dramatic force: Juanita Moore as Annie, Lora's Black maid, and Susan Kohner as her unhappy child Sarah Jane, who can, fatefully, pass for white.
Monday 7 September, 4.25pm, Film4
Call My Agent! The Movie
It is five years since French talent agency ASK closed and the staff have scattered. Andréa (Camille Cottin) is about to direct her first film but is in need of a malleable producer, so she calls on Noémie (Laure Calamy), who now works on reality TV shows. From there, it's a short step to getting the band back together – though everything that can go wrong does go wrong. With its starry cameos (Eva Longoria, George Clooney) and industry in-jokes, this spin-off from the TV show is a familiar pleasure.
Part Three won't land in cinemas until December, but such is the complexity of Frank Herbert's fantasy saga that it's best to get up to speed with the first two in the trilogy now. In this spectacular instalment, director Denis Villeneuve concentrates on the changing nature of Timothée Chalamet's desert-planet messiah, Paul Atreides, and his relationship with Zendaya's native warrior Chani. Prophecies and politics clash as an air of foreboding infiltrates events, while Austin Butler makes a memorable first impression as the smirking heir to Stellan Skarsgård's evil Baron Harkonnen.
Following her riotous introduction as Clark Kent's cousin in last year's Superman, Milly Alcock's Kara Zor-El gets her own world(s) to play in. Director Craig Gillespie leans heavily into the scuzzy, Guardians of the Galaxy end of the comic-book spectrum, as the hard-partying Kara has to sober up after galactic pirates poison her dog, Krypto, and she has three days to find them and the antidote. Chuck in a plucky orphan girl (Eve Ridley) who is bent on killing the lead criminal and you've got yourself a 12A John Wick in space.
Thursday 10 September, 8.10am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere