The claims that rocked the music industry earlier this year are put under the microscope. Plus:Mel and Sue are back with a new quizshow. Here’s what to watch this evening

9.10pm, Channel 5

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It’s a new term for Channel 4’s heartwarming look behind the scenes at a school, and Margaret Qualley starts as horny private eye. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi star in a 50s-set drama about sexual identity while the Talking Head returns with more art-pop joy

Christy
Out now
Following a prize-winning premiere at the Berlinale, this Irish drama starring Danny Power has been feted as an auspicious feature debut for director Brendan Canty. Telling the tale of two estranged brothers in Knocknaheeny, Cork, it’s a social-realist breakout hit.

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When the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was ‘the healthiest woman you’ve ever met’. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she’s re‑evaluating everything

It all starts with the coil. Of course it does. This is Davina, and Davina McCall doesn’t do personal by halves. “I loved the coil, but people always used to go, ‘I’m not getting the coil, ugh.’ I always wondered why it wasn’t more popular.” So, it was June 2023 and McCall was getting her preferred method of contraception replaced – on TV, naturally , for a documentary. “I asked my children’s permission. ‘Can Mummy get her coil refitted on television?’ They all rolled their eyes, like: ‘God! Here she goes again.’”

Post-fitting, her friend Dame Lesley Regan, a gynaecologist, suggested that McCall have a health screening at the state-of-the-art women’s health clinic where she worked, in exchange for a talk she would give on menopause. To be honest, McCall says, she thought the idea ridiculous. “I was like: ‘Honestly, I don’t need that. I’m the healthiest woman you’ve ever met. I don’t go to the doctor, I have a good immune system, I eat well.’”

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Toronto film festival: The rising star makes for a convincing boxer inside the ring in David Michôd’s by-the-numbers drama but flounders when outside

Even before Sydney Sweeney became better known for being in the centre of an increasingly absurd culture war , the unavoidable campaign to make her Hollywood’s Next Big Thing was showing signs of fatigue. The Euphoria grad, who gave a resonant performance in Reality , scored a sleeper hit with glossed up romcom Anyone But You but audiences were more impressed than critics, including myself (I found her performance strangely stilted). There was little interest from either side in her nun horror Immaculate , and earlier this summer her incredulously plotted Apple movie Echo Valley went the way of many Apple movies (no one knows it exists).

Post-thinkpieces, two of her festival duds (Eden and Americana) disappeared at the box office and she now arrives at Toronto in need of a win. And what better way to achieve that by going for an old-fashioned awards play, taking on the role of alternately inspiring and tragic boxer Christy Martin. It’s a role that’s already been buzzed about for months (Sweeney has been busy laying the standard “gruelling physical routine” groundwork) and at a time when movies about female sport stars still remain thin on the ground despite a swell of interest in them off screen, it’s a needed push in the right direction. But, as perfectly timed as this narrative might be, Christy just isn’t nearly good enough, a by-the-numbers slog that fails to prove Sweeney’s status as a one to watch.

Christy is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year

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Toronto film festival: adapted by Max Porter from his novella Shy and co-starring Little Simz, Emily Watson and Tracey Ullman this brutal but ultimately hopeful story is fiercely affecting

Producer-star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants last collaborated on a superlative adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These , and their new project together could hardly be more different: a drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour. Max Porter has adapted his own 2023 novella Shy for the screen and Murphy himself gives one of his most uninhibited and demonstrative performances.

Murphy is Steve, a stressed, troubled but passionately committed headteacher with a secret alcohol and substance abuse problem, in charge of a residential reform school for delinquent teenage boys some time in the mid-90s. With his staff – deputy (Tracey Ullman), therapist-counsellor (Emily Watson) and a new teacher (Little Simz) – he has to somehow keep order in the permanent bedlam of fights and maybe even teach them something.

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Toronto film festival: the actor is a reliably committed presence in this gentle Alan Bennett-scripted first world war tale which might have worked better on stage

There are simple Sunday afternoon pleasures to be had in the gentle comedy drama The Choral, the latest collaboration for Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett . Their last was 2015’s The Lady in the Van , a slight, mostly unmemorable film blessed by a spiky Maggie Smith performance but cursed with an uneven tone. Unlike that, and their previous two works together on screen, this wasn’t based on a play but it often feels like it and, at too many points, that it also maybe should have been one instead. There are moments of creaky comedy and some bluntly emotional dialogue that one can more easily picture in front of a specifically catered-to live audience.

On a big screen, The Choral is a little out of place, its only moments of pure cinema courtesy of the spectacular Yorkshire scenery. Well, that and those when star Ralph Fiennes fully takes command, an actor who adds not just weight and class but also one who gives a more studied and delicate performance than many of those around him. The star is having a bit of a moment after both Conclave and 28 Years Later and while this project is in a far lower register, and far less likely to be meme-friendly, it’s further proof of his remarkable flexibility. He plays Dr Guthrie, a choir master hired by desperate locals in 1916, a time of loss and confusion, with many already dead or missing and many others waiting to be conscripted. It’s meddled with the social order and allowed for some to find space they might not have otherwise occupied, shown in the new makeup of the choir, which Guthrie must craft and control.

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Toronto film festival: Steve Coogan and a knockout Éanna Hardwicke take on Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane in this involving workplace drama about a 2002 tabloid storm

If the average cinemagoer sits down to watch the movie Saipan, unaware of the incident that inspired it, then an immediate montage of frantic radio soundbites does a nifty job at setting the scene before we’ve even seen a single image. Premiering at the Toronto film festival, it’s likely that might be the case for many international attendees here, and Irish directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa set themselves the lofty task of translating the overwhelming scale of a very 2002 tabloid scandal for those who weren’t knee-deep in the hows and whys. Words like soap and drama are thrown around, while one commentator compares the public outcry to that seen after the death of Princess Diana. How did a fight over cheese sandwiches turn into such a frenzy?

At its heart, Saipan is a workplace drama about the danger of mismanagement and the inescapability of office politics, it pulses with the relatable anger that erupts from the feeling of unfair treatment. It just so happens that the workplace is the world of football and the warring employees are two highly paid household names reaching boiling point as the World Cup looms. Steve Coogan is Mick McCarthy, a player turned manager, taking charge of the Republic of Ireland team as they make a rare appearance in a global tournament they’re not typically associated with (it was their third, and to date most recent, World Cup). The media is perhaps rightfully crediting this to the involvement of Roy Keane, played by Éanna Hardwicke, whose success as part of Manchester United has levelled the national team up, whether McCarthy likes to admit it or not. They have a spotty history (we hear a brief reference to an on-pitch spar years prior) but both are entering a crucial period on best behaviour, aware of the many eyes on them. Long-time Shane Meadows collaborator Paul Fraser’s script lightly stacks up bones of contention in the months before flying us to Saipan, the location of a poorly defined team trip that’s part gameplay prep and part R&R. Keane, an often humourless workhorse, is already struggling to play ball, annoyed at the ostentatious excess of the Football Association of Ireland and unsure of McCarthy’s decision-making.

Saipan is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date

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There’s a real 00s feel to the double act’s hit-and-miss return. But the highs it hits are proof that this neglected form of comedy has plenty of life left in it

It has been 15 years since That Mitchell and Webb Look left our screens, but it’s still hanging around like a funny smell. Inexplicable quiz Numberwang springs to mind every time a ludicrously complex gameshow airs; hyperbolic football coverage invariably evokes the show’s Sky Sports parody – “there is still everything to play for … and for ever to play it in!” – even for the broadcaster itself, which recently recreated the skit for promo purposes. It has never been easier to run into the duo online: the SS officer tentatively asking his skull-festooned colleague if they could possibly be “the baddies” has had a second life as a Trump-era meme. Then there are the ones that have seared themselves on to my memory for no apparent reason, like the sketch in which a swaggering marketing team workshop new ways to sell toothbrushes (they can also clean your tongue!).

Arriving just as Peep Show was taking off, That Mitchell and Webb Look didn’t quite reach Fast Show levels of ubiquity, but it was clever, memorable and distinctive enough to infiltrate the monoculture. It was also part of sketch comedy’s last hurrah. The genre’s 00s TV heyday wasn’t always edifying (see the social poison pedalled by Little Britain and Bo’ Selecta), yet its almost total eradication – a sketch show hasn’t been Bafta-nominated for over a decade and there is no longer any category that could feasibly accommodate one – has robbed us not only of a particular source of joy, but an important mechanism for digesting the world.

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