Five things to watch this week

James Ashcroft directs this adaptation of the novel by Alex North starring Adam Scott, Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton. When his wife dies, grieving father Tom Kennedy (Scott) relocates to the small town of Featherbed with his son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto). Fifteen years ago, Featherbed was terrorised by a serial killer known as the Whisper Man. But after his son disappears, Tom realises the Whisper Man is still at large. With the help of his estranged father, Peter Willis (De Niro), a former police detective, and detective Amanda Beck (Monaghan), Tom must stop the killer and save his son before it’s too late.

With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sparking much debate about film adaptations of the Greek classics, Italian maverick Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1967 adaptation of Sophocles’ play still offers a singular approach to the problem. “Inspired by” the original story, Pasolini’s adaptation follows the fateful journey of Edipo (Franco Citti) rescued from abandonment as a boy, raised by a king and queen, and plagued by a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Pasolini’s first full-colour feature weaves its magic jumping between 1920s Italy and ancient Greece and is a provocative reinterpretation of the source material that draws on myriad influences and cultural references for a distinctly Pasolini twist on a myth that has held us in its grasp for thousands of years.

Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 comedy about a group of teenage girls who form a punk band to play covers of real-life band The Blue Hearts has become something of a cult favourite. As Indiewire critic David Ehrlich declared in 2018, when selecting it as one of his best Japanese films of the 21st century, it’s a film that’s “euphorically fun … so rich, so charismatic, and so damn catchy, you’ll be itching to show it to all your friends”.

Italian giallo horror master Dario Argento cast a young Jennifer Connelly in her first lead role for this 1985 chiller. Connelly plays Jennifer Corvino, the daughter of an American actor who arrives at the Richard Wagner Academy for Girls in Switzerland. Plagued by a sleep-walking affliction, Jennifer’s nighttime wanderings reveal to her a dark and deadly web of evil goings-on that she must defeat if she’s to save herself and her friends.

Perhaps Federico Fellini’s least celebrated film, this 1955 crime caper was released outside Italy only nine years later. Starring Fellini’s beloved wife and regular collaborator, Giulietta Masina, and veteran Hollywood character actor Broderick Crawford, the film follows a group of con artists working in the countryside outside Rome, where they use various methods, including posing as clerics and local government officials, to trick poor farmers and shanty town dwellers out of their savings. As the law closes in and some members of the gang face a crisis of conscience, everything begins to unravel.