Léa Seydoux's Gentle Monster Leads This Week's Seven Best TV Films

Léa Seydoux stars in Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer's follow-up to Corsage, arriving on Netflix on Wednesday 18 November as the pick of the week's TV films. Kreutzer's drama of love, betrayal and family secrets casts Seydoux — a performer who, as the source review puts it, "never seems to make a bad film" — as Lucy, a musician living in the countryside outside Munich with her film-maker husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) and their young son Johnny (Malo Blanchet). Then a police officer, Elsa (Jella Haase), appears at the door and Philip is arrested for possession of child sexual abuse images. Lucy's certainties collapse; Elsa contends with her own father's dementia. The review calls it "devastating" and warns the tale "grows more disturbing with each revelation".

What else is on?

Heartland (out now, Netflix). Jessica Chastain wears the Stetson and carries the gun in Shana Feste's Nashville mystery drama. Her has-been country star, Misty Jones, returns reluctantly to the home of country when her rising niece Charlie goes missing. Misty irritates music industry executives and the police alike while investigating a town full of secrets. The review concedes a suspect list "oddly reminiscent of Scooby-Doo" and some on-the-nose songs, but judges that Chastain pulls it off.

Ran (Saturday 15 slot: 14 November, 9pm, BBC Four). Akira Kurosawa's version of King Lear transplants the tragedy to Japan's feudal past. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the ageing warlord Hidetora, who abdicates in favour of his eldest son while presuming he can keep his status. A fight for power follows with the second in line as Hidetora loses his reason. Colour-coded armies sweep through epic battles across mist-wrapped mountains, and Mieko Harada's manipulative Lady Kaede earns the review's verdict: a villain Shakespeare would have been proud to call his own.

Conclave (Sunday, Netflix). Robert Harris's page-turner about electing a new pope becomes Edward Berger's twisty drama. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, tasked with organising the gathering of Catholic luminaries to choose the next vicar of Christ. Voting and plotting go hand in hand; the favourites come and go. The review's judgment is direct: "A superb mystery, with Fiennes a rock as the one honest broker."

Eileen (Tuesday 17 November, 9pm, Film4). Thomasin McKenzie plays the 24-year-old title character, who lives with her alcoholic retired police chief father and works as a secretary in a Massachusetts boys' prison. Her dull existence changes when the new prison psychologist Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a sophisticated free spirit, arrives — and Eileen becomes infatuated. William "Lady Macbeth" Oldroyd directs from Ottessa Moshfegh's novel, with, the review notes, "a darker game to play in a story of female liberation, whatever the cost".

When a Witness Recants (Wednesday 18 November, HBO Max). Dawn Porter's documentary examines a miscarriage of justice in 1983 Baltimore, where teenage friends Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins were wrongly convicted of the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy. The prosecution case rested on witnesses who later said police coerced them into changing their statements. The three men were released and exonerated after 36 years. One witness speaks for the first time, and the freed men talk, in the review's words, "heart-rendingly about their lost years and continuing lack of closure".

The Dead Don't Hurt (Friday 20 November, 11pm, BBC Two). Viggo Mortensen writes, directs and stars as Holger, the Danish sheriff of a rural California town who has just buried his wife Vivienne (Vicky Krieps). Flashbacks trace their love story as immigrants on the American frontier, from tender, playful courtship to foreshadowed tragedy. The review savours two nuanced performers at ease with a "less is more" ethos making their mark on the western.

What does the week's schedule change for viewers?

It spreads quality across platforms: two BBC terrestrial slots (Ran, The Dead Don't Hurt), one Film4 broadcast (Eileen) and four streaming titles. The heaviest night is Wednesday 18 November, when Gentle Monster and When a Witness Recants land simultaneously — pick according to appetite, because one is fiction that disturbs and the other is fact that enrages.