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What's on TV: Saturday, February 4, 2017

movie A Bigger Splash (2015)
Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 6.20pm

Soaked in the Mediterranean sun so that the languid and self-destructive grow warm and welcoming together, A Bigger Splash is a terrific summation of the physical intimacy of psychological intrusion. A whirlwind record producer, Harry Hawkes (a remarkable Ralph Fiennes) arrives at the hideaway of his former love, rock star Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), and her boyfriend, Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts), accompanied by his newly discovered daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love) punctuates the landscape with expressive bodies – whether still like the recuperating Marianne or jittery and mercurial like Harry – and the inevitable friction of close quarters: concern becomes intrusive, boundaries are blurred. Nearly every frame is evocatively exact. The illusion of satisfaction brings about a loss of self-control and the tension that grows up out of these characters reaches a boiling point that is both physically and philosophically wrenching. CM

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Death in Paradise
7.30pm, ABC

The new season of this gentle British-French crime-comedy series (think a tropical Midsomer Murders) returns for a new season, as gently comic as ever. Grumpy Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall) is still wearing a shirt and blazer despite the fact everyone else is scantily clad (most notably his sidekick, Florence, played by Josephine Jobert) although he's bought himself a boat with a view to enjoying the tropical paradise he's reluctantly found himself in - and we even get to sight him in a T-shirt as he starts doing it up. Tonight he's investigating the death of a prominent marine scientist who was murdered while skippering a boat – while all his colleagues were under the water researching coral bleaching. But things aren't as straightforward as they seem – nor as grisly as they could be in grittier surrounds. After lots of hypothesising, flashbacks and a terribly British Agatha Christie-style ending, the bumbling Goodman gets his suspect. KN

pay The Magicians
Syfy, 8.30pm

Bad guys always have the best style, and usually the best attitude too. While the earnest young wizards from New York's adults-only version of Hogwarts are looking like they've just put a box of tissues through the washing machine, the murderous monster known as The Beast (Charles Mesure) is cheerfully swanning about in a three-piece suit, eating sugary cereal out of the box and singing Noel Coward numbers to musical accompaniment he has conjured out of thin air. To be fair to the others, though, they are mostly preoccupied with trying to undo the damage that The Beast has wrought, both in New York and in the magical land of Fillory. The key part of that quest tonight involves the retrieval of lost battle magic from a sex-enthusiast pixie named Professor Bigby. Imaginative fun for lovers of everything from Harry Potter to True Blood. BN

movie Bad Company (2002)
7flix, 8.30pm

Anthony Hopkins positioned himself as a sturdy mentor for action and adventure films in the late 1990s: he confronted a bear in The Edge, picked up a rapier for The Mask of Zorro and charged down a Prague street in a leather jacket while toting a pistol in Bad Company. The latter was definitely the worst: a hackneyed action-adventure based around the idea of mismatched partners that was directed by Joel Schumacher and producer by Jerry Bruckheimer. Gaylord Oakes (Hopkins) is the consummate CIA technocrat, nine days away from purchasing a stolen nuclear weapon in the hands of the Russian mafia when his lead operative, Jake Hayes, is killed in an ambush. Oakes is forced to recruit Jake's identical twin brother Kevin (Chris Rock), a streetwise New York ticket tout, to finish the mission. Thrust into the world of international espionage, Kevin basically cracks jokes but never upends decorum. CM