Boston Strangler to The Hurt Locker: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

The true story of the killer, or killers, who murdered 13 women in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s is filtered through the work of two female news reporters in Matt Ruskin’s gripping drama. Keira Knightley brings a no-nonsense steeliness to her portrayal of journalist Loretta McLaughlin, the first person to see a link between the killings. Joining forces with a more experienced colleague Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), she follows leads, uncovers further deaths and tails suspects, while the city police flounder. McLaughlin’s increasingly obsessive quest, and its lack of closure, is reminiscent of David Fincher’s Zodiac, as is the personal toll it exacts on her.

Out now, Disney+

In these post-Roe v Wade times, here’s a sharp reminder of what it was like in the 60s before the abortion ruling came into effect. Elizabeth Banks plays Joy, a lawyer’s wife and mother of a 15-year-old girl. When her second pregnancy places her in a life-threatening situation and the hospital refuses a termination, she calls a helpline that provides illegal abortions. Late to the cause of women’s liberation, Joy is drawn into their necessary but morally fraught work in a film from Phyllis Nagy that retains optimistic top notes despite the injustice.

Saturday 18 March, 2.55pm, 9.55pm, Sky Cinema Premiere

“War is a drug,” says a quote at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s sweat-soaked Iraq occupation thriller. That is what Jeremy Renner’s bomb disposal expert Sgt William James contends with as he leads his Baghdad-based US army unit out to defuse IEDs, devices in cars, even humans strapped with explosives. His addiction isn’t shared by his colleagues, particularly Anthony Mackie’s JT Sanborn who fears James’s insouciance in the face of danger will be the death of them. Bigelow builds an atmosphere of near-constant tension where everyone could be your enemy.

Sunday 19 March, 10.45pm, BBC Two

Not many films are narrated by a dead body floating in a swimming pool, but Billy Wilder’s 1950 film is a rare delight – a noirish thriller that’s also a Hollywood drama and a meta-comedy about faded stardom starring an actual faded star. Gloria Swanson is a real trouper as Norma Desmond, holed up in a mansion with her butler – former director and ex-husband Max (played by Swanson’s erstwhile director Erich von Stroheim). Then William Holden’s hard-up screenwriter turns up and her dreams of a comeback are, fatefully, revived.

Tuesday 21 March, 6.05pm, Sky Cinema Greats

Allison Otto’s deliciously speculative documentary tells the peculiar story of Jerry and Rita Alter. A firm clearing the couple’s New Mexico house after their deaths found a Willem de Kooning painting stolen 30 years earlier. So who were the globetrotting music teacher and his speech therapist wife? The truth remains tantalisingly out of reach, but with reconstructions played for laughs and excerpts from Jerry’s possibly autobiographical crime fiction, it’s an entertaining thread to follow.

Wednesday 22 March, Prime Video

When arch provocateur Paul Verhoeven teamed up with the risk-taking Isabelle Huppert for this 2016 French drama, the shock value was guaranteed to be high. Huppert stars as Michèle, the co-owner of a company that creates violent video games, who is raped in her home by a masked intruder. With a mistrust of the police born of her horrific family history, she doesn’t report the attack; indeed, she is intrigued, if not turned on, by her feelings about it. In the magnetic Huppert’s hands, Michèle’s fear, anger and desire are conflated in a dark thriller that challenges women-in-peril tropes.

Wednesday 22 March, 12.50am, Film4

Samuel Fuller’s bold, brutal 1964 melodrama takes a wrecking ball to the hidden hypocrisies and crimes of small-town American life. Sex worker Kelly (Constance Towers) reinvents herself as a nurse for disabled children in white-picket-fence Grantville. Despite the police chief’s refusal to believe her career change is for real, she finds a good man who loves her, Michael Dante’s wealthy local bigwig. But all is not as it appears … Fuller’s pulp fiction roots are clear in the plot’s twists, but there’s real humanity at play here, too.

Thursday 23 March, 1.40am, Talking Pictures TV