Tenzing to Goodfellas: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

To Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) and British expedition leader Col John Hunt (Willem Dafoe), it was ‘Mount Everest’, named to honour a 19th-century British Raj official. But Tenzing Norgay (Genden Phuntsok), the Tibetan-Indian mountaineer who joined them on that historic 1953 trek to the summit, called the peak by its Sherpa name Chomolungma, meaning “holy mother”. To Tenzing, the mountain is not so much somewhere to conquer but someone to connect with. As director Jennifer Peedom’s film tells his story, it scales the heights of the adventure biopic, discovering new angles from which to view old themes of ambition, colonialism and class.
Out now, Apple TV

Cléo from 5 to 7

The plot of this 1962, Agnès Varda-directed classic is deceptively simple: as she awaits the results of a cancer biopsy, Florence (Corinne Marchand), a singer known professionally as ‘Cléo Victoire’, wanders around Paris, meeting old friends and strangers, getting tarot readings or going to the cinema; alternating between despair, resignation and a kind of ecstasy. Yet each encounter, and even the apparent longueurs in between, vibrates with the life-affirming energy of the French New Wave, a movement busily reinventing the form before our very eyes.
Saturday 17 October, 9.45pm, BBC Four

Goodfellas

It’s the greatest mafia film of all time. The Sopranos’ archetype. Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of masterpieces, and a film you should rewatch every few years just to recalibrate your cinematic senses. Ray Liotta stars as Henry Hill, an Irish-Italian kid from round the way, and an “average nobody”, according to his iconic voiceover. That is, until he gets mixed up with wiseguys Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Paulie (Paul Sorvino), who teach him their code and show him the only way to live.
Saturday 17 October, 11.40pm, Sky Cinema Greats

A Want in Her

Myrid Carten’s mother Nuala is a character, a charmer and an elusive mystery. She’s also a woman struggling to get a grip on her addiction issues and the mum that Myrid has spent a lifetime trying to find – sometimes when she was missing, presumed on a bender in Belfast, and sometimes when she was right there, smoking rollies in the same room. Carten’s Bafta-nominated debut feature is about this search, involving interviews with other eccentric relatives around rural Donegal. This is documentary at its most lushly poetic.
Tuesday 20 October, 10pm, BBC Four

Moana

This must be the role Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was born to play: muscular demigod Maui in the live-action remake of Moana. The animated musical was an instant hit when it was first released in 2016, with moving, catchy songs written by the master Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a screenplay drawing from Polynesian mythology. This version survives the transition to photorealism, thanks to Johnson’s winning brio and a star-making turn from Catherine Laga’aia as the ocean-faring lead.
Wednesday 21 October, Disney+

How to Make a Killing

Even attempting to remake 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, that undisputed British classic in which Alec Guinness has a virtuosic turn as all eight members of the doomed D’Ascoyne family, is an audacious act of American cockiness. But then “audacious American cockiness” is exactly the vibe that star Glen Powell specialises in. He plays Becket Redfellow, the orphaned son of an estranged heiress, who believes himself entitled to the family fortune and will stop at nothing to secure it – not even serial killing in a succession of silly wigs.
Friday 23 October, 9.05am, 8pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story

If you’ve ever wondered how Maria Bamford got that way, here’s the answer: a documentary about the life of this true one-off – your favourite standup’s favourite standup – co-directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkley, featuring interviews with Conan O’Brien, Tig Notaro and Stephen Colbert. Bamford also appears, of course, in an intimate interview recorded in her California home, and her singular voice guides us through archive footage, from home movies of her Minnesota childhood through to the basement comedy venues of her early career.
Friday 23 October, Netflix