Report from a Polish village in the primeval forest and an American science fiction film: this is not to be missed on TV tonight

Today’s TV tips

Frontline

Documentary series. Journalist Dore van Duivenbode is in Bialowieza, a Polish village in the middle of the primeval forest on the border with Belarus. She meets ‘soldiers of the forest’, people who help refugees in need. Because after the invasion of Ukraine, the forest has become the new Iron Curtain. The Polish government has a 186 kilometer long fence built. Refugees who manage to cross the border with the help of Belarus risk violent and illegal pushbacks.

At 8.35 pm on VRT Canvas.

Deux

Movie. Nina and Madeleine are two retired women who have been in love with each other for decades. To the outside world, including Madeleine’s family, they are simply neighbors on the top floor of their apartment building. They move freely between both apartments and share their daily lives. One day, an unexpected event causes Madeleine’s daughter to learn the truth.

At 9.15 pm on VRT Canvas.

Total recall

Movie. Construction worker Douglas Quaid has been dreaming of a trip to Mars for years, much to the chagrin of his wife Lori. Because Douglas obviously cannot afford a trip to Mars, he decides to have a virtual vacation implanted in his brain by the Rekall company. However, during the procedure things go wrong: the implanted memory comes into conflict with his suppressed real memory. Douglas has already been to Mars, but he no longer remembers this because someone has modified his memory. Or are all the things he experiences part of his implanted holiday?

At 10:30 PM on VTM 4.

The best on Netflix, Streamz and co.

Baby Reindeer

Life is not going so well for a while for Donny (Richard Gadd), who is in his late thirties. He was dumped by his girlfriend not long after moving from Edinburgh to London. Donny is a struggling stand-up comedian, who perhaps should have worked on his repertoire a little longer before taking that step to the capital.

So for a living he works as a bartender in a pub in Camden, where a seemingly innocent act of kindness – he offers a free drink to Martha (Jessica Gunning), who is sitting on dry semen – lands like a boomerang back in his pocket. : Martha starts stalking him, and also becomes visibly bolder in her methods.

On Netflix.

Shogun

The ten part Shogunstarring the relatively unknown British-American actor Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne and Hiroyuki Sanada (John Wick: Chapter 4) as Toranaga, is a sequence of epic grandeur, which echoes Ridley Scott’s recent Napoleon And especially – Game of Thrones shows. She is fearless in showing the often inhumanly cruel traditions on which feudal Japan was founded. The sex is depicted as chastely as in the soon to be 45-year-old original, but the violence goes a few octaves higher; although what you are served is more of a frenzied grandguignol than that Shogun tries to shock with its brutality.

On Disney+.

Fallout

Before the atomic bombs were dropped and all of America turned into a radioactive wasteland, opportunistic mutant bounty hunter Cooper (Walton Goggins) was an actor in old-fashioned straight-up Westerns, specializing in the old-fashioned righteous cowboy.

In the series Fallout, Based on the brilliant video game series of the same name, the occasional flashbacks to Cooper’s pre-apocalyptic acting life provide a razor-sharp picture of the morally gray area in which this unapologetically pulpy parable about greed, group formation and the urge to survive takes place.

On Amazon Prime Video.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

With Donald Glover as screenwriter and protagonist Mr. & Mrs. Smith you expect an alienating, Lynchian universe like that of his hit series Atlanta. Nothing is less true. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is rooted in more classic fiction, more specifically a spy world such as that of James Bond, Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible. The 2005 film of the same name with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is a difficult point of comparison. That entertaining Hollywood lightweight relied on the sparks between the leading actors and the spectacular shoot-outs. Pitt and Jolie played a married pair of spy-hitmen, albeit for rival employers. One day they are ordered by their respective bosses to kill each other.

Glovers’ premise Mr. & Mrs. Smith is quite different. In the series, he and a superb Maya Erskine are given a spacious New York row house as a base for a mysterious organization. They have to go through life as John and Jane Smith, a married couple, both computer programmers.

On Amazon Prime Video.