Kurt Russell in Grindhouse: Death Proof
11 pm/ET STZ
Quentin Tarantino's better half of the Grindhouse double feature takes its cue from ultra-threadbare regional oddities like Psycho from Texas and Kidnapped Coed, in which heedless girlies blunder onto the path of some killer on the road and long stretches of boredom erupt into sudden spasms of brutal violence. Tarantino dips into a lean, mean pool of killer cliches and successfully blends vintage stunt driving, feminist girls-fight-back tropes, and a sleepy, creepy sense of the nasty stuff that occurs on dirty back roads. Kurt Russell stars.
2 pm/ET TCM
One of Hitchcock's creepiest, and his personal favorite among his own films. Teresa Wright stars as a small-town California teenager whose favorite uncle (Joseph Cotten) comes to visit. She loves his big-city smarts, style and wit, but what she doesn't know is that her dear Uncle Charlie is also a brutal serial killer of wealthy widows. In a stroke of genius, Hitchcock got Thornton Wilde to write the screenplay, assuming he would be the perfect scenarist to bring to life this portrait of homey Americana tainted by evil. He was right.
5;30 pm/ET AMC
A landmark Western that established the Clint Eastwood persona, revitalized the genre and put the spaghetti Western on the international map. The deceptively simple plot — lifted from Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest by way of Kurosawa's Yojimbo — has Eastwood, as the mysterious Man With No Name, riding into a small town embroiled in a struggle for power between two families. He hires himself out as a mercenary, first to one faction and then to the other, with no regard for honor or morality.
10 pm/ET TCM
"They are young, they are in love, they kill people." A landmark gangster film that made a huge commercial and cultural splash, striking a nerve with the 1967 youth culture as it reimagined the two rural Depression-era outlaws (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) as sympathetic nonconformists. The film set new standards for screen violence, but even more disturbing was the way director Arthur Penn alternates scenes of mayhem with lyrical interludes and jaunty slapstick sequences. The powerhouse supporting cast includes Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons and Gene Wilder, in his screen debut.
12 am/ET SUND
Director Mike Leigh is best known for gritty films about contemporary British life, so it's hard to imagine what drew him to the story of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) — England's masters of light opera — and the creation of one of their best works, The Mikado. But how marvelous that he was; this slice of ruthlessly genteel Victorian life is charming, witty and offers its ensemble cast a wealth of dramatic opportunities.
