Naomi Watts enchants even giants: The TV feature film tips for the weekend

But fans of computer-generated monumental animal films will also get their money’s worth with “King Kong” and “Fantastic Beasts”.

Two outliers from the mainstream are also there: Charlotte Wells’ beautifully sad family drama “Aftersun” with Paul Mescal and Paul Verhoeven’s campy neo-nunsploitation thriller “Benedetta”.

Particular severity of guilt, Saturday, June 20th, WDR, 8:15 p.m

Joseph Komalschek (Götz George) spent 30 years in prison for the brutal murder of his neighbor and her newborn child because of the particular gravity of the guilt. Innocent.

Now he’s coming out and the police are guarding him around the clock. The three police officers who put Komalschek behind bars, Fritz Reet (Hans-Martin Stier), Heinz Braun (Thomas Thieme), Klaus Barner (Manfred Zapatka) become nervous…

Sascha Arango’s script is immediately captivating. A phobic crime thriller. Kaspar Heidelbach, as an experienced “crime scene” director, calculates exactly how much an image can reveal. Together with cameraman Daniel Koppelkamm, he starts a game of cat and mouse.

Götz George plays the “career criminal” with enormous precision, with the clarity of someone who wants everyone, including himself, to recognize the truth. (Joachim Huber)

King Kong, Saturday, June 20, Sat.1, 10:25 p.m

Peter Jackson (“Lord of the Rings,” “The Hobbit”) wanted to remake “King Kong” all his life. Like its original from 1933, the film is a great, succinct metaphor for the victory of modernity over the archaic, of culture over nature. But above all it is a touching love story.

The giant ape loves his captive creature: in the old black and white film he spared it and fell alone down the facade of the Empire State Building, torn apart by the bullets of the Air Force biplane flying squadron. With Peter Jackson, however, the girl repays him for her care with gratitude and her loneliness with warmth. And gives him some kind of love.

The tender romance is, of course, a variant of the French fairy tale “La belle et la bête”, which made a huge career as “The Beauty and the Beast”. The monster’s tragic love alone makes the material seem spectacular, but it is the reciprocating love of the beautiful Belle, who transforms the beast back into the prince, that makes the story immortal. So is the mutual romance between Ann Darrow and King Kong.

Jack Black as directing maniac Carl Denham of Orson Wellesian proportions, Adrien Brody as a sensitive, humorous screenwriter and Thomas Kretschmann as the robust Captain Englehorn form an excellent ensemble that can easily hold its own against the sensational, computer-generated images of the prehistoric giants on Skull Island. (Jan Schulz-Ojala)

On the hunt, Saturday, June 20th, Vox, 11 p.m

How times have changed! In the legendary TV series “On the Run” (1963-67), the protagonist, innocently suspected of murder, was still an average citizen. In the 1993 cinema version, Harrison Ford gave the part more heroic traits. The hero of the sequel has superhuman traits rather than heroic traits.

At first glance, Mark Roberts (Wesley Snipes) is a good little mechanic who is completely helpless in the face of a double murder charge. But it soon turns out that he works for the secret service and should be sacrificed for strategic reasons.

James Bond could envy his technical equipment. Mark Roberts knows everything and sees everything. The police who are pursuing him across the USA are hopelessly outgunned. The tension suffers a little because the viewer doesn’t have to worry about Mark Roberts.

However, this seems to be intentional and not an inability to do so, because the focus is no longer on the innocent suspect, but on his hunter, US Marshal Sam Gerard. Tommy Lee Jones, who won an Oscar for the same role in The Fugitive.

The most surprising quality of the film is the design of what is essentially a thankless role: Irene Jacob plays the girlfriend of the hunted man and doesn’t actually have much to do. But Jacob’s acting is intelligent, funny and seductive; one can only congratulate her on this trip to Hollywood. (Frank Noack)

Aftersun, Saturday, June 20th, 3sat, 11:35 p.m

For eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio), father Calum (Paul Mescal) is more of a big brother than an authority figure. The girl lives with her mother in England, and father and daughter are spending a package holiday together in a Turkish resort. A rare moment of connection. And always there is the camcorder, seeming to capture something that will prove painfully fleeting.

Shortly before her 30th birthday, Sophie looks at these pictures and compares them with her memory in order to understand what she couldn’t understand as a child. The relationship between memory and imagination is the major theme around which Scottish director Charlotte Wells’s feature film debut revolves.

“Aftersun” received multiple awards and won critics’ polls for the best film or debut film of 2022. Lead actor Mescal also received an Oscar nomination. (Andreas Busche)

Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Pro7, 8:15 p.m

The second part of the Harry Potter spin-off takes place in Paris, from where villain Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) wants to end the peaceful coexistence between humans and magicians. With peroxide blonde hair, pale complexion and pale irises, Depp’s villain looks like an Aryan nightmare figure, the kind that’s coming back into fashion today.

This is once again opposed as anti-hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne). The magizoologist has a deep knowledge of and appreciation for the diversity of the fantastic animal kingdom, which also determines his attitude towards humans and magicians.

With great attention to detail, director David Yates transforms the digital Paris of the 1920s into a magical place. But the beloved Hogwarts is also rediscovered as a location where childhood and youth memories provide the key to a complex web of plots. (Martin Schwickert)

Benedetta, Sunday June 21st, Arte, 11:40 p.m

“Your body is your greatest enemy,” a nun says to eight-year-old Benedetta when she is accepted into the Theatine monastery in Pescia. The scratchy robe that she has to wear from now on illustrates Catholic hostility to the body first hand. The pleasure and suffering of Benedetta’s adult body form the focus of Paul Verhoeven’s film of the same name, which is inspired by true events but should by no means be misunderstood as a factual historical drama.

Rather, it is Verhoeven’s contribution to the nunsploitation genre, a form of erotic and exploitation film that was particularly popular in the 1970s. The 87-year-old Dutchman (“Basic Instinct,” “Elle”) has a lot of fun showing Benedetta having sex with a novice, putting naked breasts in the picture and staging trashy visions with a hipster Jesus.

This often seems funny, but also somewhat intentional. Will “Benedetta” still develop into a camp classic like Verhoeven’s “Showgirls” before it? (Nadine Lange)