The best films to watch on TV over Easter, from Twisters to Priscilla

Thursday 17 April Touch (2024) ★★★★ Sky Cinema Premiere, 4.30pm Baltasar Kormákur’s sweeping romantic drama centres on Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur) and Miko (Kōki), whose illicit love affair in 1960s London is cut short by their respective families. Decades later, the story is interlaced with scenes of Kristófer as an old man, tirelessly in pursuit of Miko and set on rekindling their love.

Fans of Past Lives or Before Sunrise will find much to love. The Client (1994) ★★★★ ITV4, 11.30pm One of countless John Grisham film adaptations (along with The Rainmaker, A Time to Kill, and many others), this legal drama, directed by Joel Schumacher, stars Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.



When 11-year-old Mark (Brad Renfro) witnesses the suicide of a mob lawyer, the police try to get him to testify in court. But Mark isn’t keen, and instead hires a feisty attorney (Sarandon, deservedly Oscar-nominated) to protect him. Denmark (2019) ★★★ BBC Two, 11.

50pm Welshman Herb’s (Rafe Spall) life is a right old mess. His welfare payments have stopped, he can’t find a job, his son hates him, and his diet consists of cheap beer and tinned mush. So when he watches a documentary about Danish prisoners’ high quality of life – and how they’re treated to great healthcare, TV, and a countryside location – he travels across Europe on a mission: to get arrested in Denmark and sent down.

Wickedly funny. Good Friday Twisters (2024) ★★★★★ Sky Cinema Premiere, 8pm Glen Powell staked his claim to be the new King of Hollywood (he was mentored by Tom Cruise, after all) in Lee Isaac Chung’s terrific follow-up to Twister (1996). Powell is a cocky storm-chaser who teams up with Daisy Edgar-Jones’s gifted scientist to investigate an outbreak of devastating tornadoes in Oklahoma.

It’s silly in the sort of way the best action movies are, and the climactic scene is a corker. The King’s Speech (2010) ★★★★★ BBC Two, 10pm Tom Hooper’s stirring film about the future King George VI’s struggle to overcome his stammer won multiple Oscars, including Best Actor for Colin Firth and Best Picture (beating the dazzling likes of Black Swan, The Social Network and True Grit). But it’s his double-act with Geoffrey Rush, as the King’s speech therapist Lionel Logue, and their doubleheaders, courtesy of screenwriter David Seidler, that give the film its heart.

Fall (2022) ★★★ BBC One, 10.30pm It’s perhaps wise to avoid Scott Mann’s survival thriller if you have a fear of heights: its protagonists spend the majority of the film stuck atop a 2,000-foot-tall broadcasting tower. Becky and Hunter (Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner) find themselves stranded after climbing to the top to scatter a partner’s ashes; what ensues is their descent into psychosis, as the heat, starvation and sheer terror pushes them to the brink.

Saturday 19 April Lightyear (2022) ★★★ BBC One, 5.40pm Pixar managed to rub Toy Story fans up the wrong way with this sci-fi prequel, which dives into the early life of hero Buzz Lightyear. Their first error? Replacing original voice actor Tim Allen (was it his Right-leaning politics?) with the nice-but-soppy Chris Evans.

Thus, Buzz himself never truly convinces, but as can be expected from the studio, the animation is delightful and the plot – an intergalactic Star Wars-esque caper complete with a robot cat companion – is good fun. Easter Sunday Priscilla (2023) ★★★★ BBC Two, 10pm Director Sofia Coppola brings her dreamlike lens to the story of Priscilla Presley , the King’s wife who he met when she was 14 years old. Cailee Spaeny is illuminating in the lead, while Jacob Elordi is all brooding angst as Elvis.

Coppola keeps the light low to emphasise Priscilla’s shuttering off from the world. Yet her heroine embraces her sentence as much as she pushes back against it: the film’s USP is poking around the psychological grey space between being kept and being caught. Easter Monday Dumbo (2019) ★★★ BBC One, 7.

20pm Tim Burton’s live-action update of Disney’s classic animation doesn’t quite live up to the magic – or emotional heft – of the 1941 original. The director, best known for his Gothic family flicks, from Edward Scissorhands to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, injects a darker edge to the tale of Dumbo the flying elephant, the adorable victim of Michael Keaton’s greedy, menacing circus owner. The starry likes of Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito and Eva Green lend support.

Tuesday 22 April Baby Driver (2017) ★★★★ Great! Movies, 9pm Edgar Wright’s infectious car-chase thriller, about a getaway-driving savant (West Side Story’s Ansel Elgort) whose every move behind the wheel is in Olympic-level sync with whichever song is pulsing through his iPod, will make you believe in magic. The editing is stunning and keeps the film a skip ahead of its forebears, but it’s the exhilarating, beautifully curated soundtrack – featuring the likes of The Beach Boys, The Damned and Simon & Garfunkel – that sets it apart. Wednesday 23 April The Guns of Navarone (1961) ★★★★★ Film4, 3.

45pm Gregory Peck and David Niven lead a boatful of chaps (including Anthony Quinn and Anthony Quayle) over the Aegean Sea on a perilous mission to scale a cliff and blow up German guns. The Guns of Navarone is a classic Second World War adventure, filled with fights and big characters, based on Alistair MacLean’s rollicking novel. They don’t make ’em like this any more – and even if they did, it wouldn’t have the terrific Dimitri Tiomkin theme tune.

Thursday 24 April My Cousin Vinny (1992) ★★★ Comedy Central, 9pm Slick Italian-American New Yorkers clash with rural Alabama when two college kids are arrested for murder while on a road trip. Unable to afford an attorney, they summon cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci), unaware he’s merely an inexperienced personal injury lawyer. Jonathan Lynn’s comedy is not without its stereotyping, but there are powerhouse performances from Pesci and Marisa Tomei, in an Oscar-winning turn as Vinny’s fiancée, whose mechanical know-how proves vital to the defence.

Friday 25 April The Mule (2018) ★★★★ BBC One, 10.40pm; Wales, 11.10pm Clint Eastwood, who both directs and stars in this crime drama, plays Earl Stone, a sweet 90-year-old man who ends up running drugs for a cartel after his farm business fails (based, bizarrely, on a true story).

He’s an old codger who comes good: as in many late-career Eastwood projects though, we spend far too much time indulging his un-PC outbursts. Bradley Cooper and Laurence Fishburne also star as DEA agents hot on his tail..