Shrek (2001)

BBC One, 5.25pm

The first winner of a new Oscar category for Best Animated Feature, Shrek remains a dazzling blend of computer generated characters, smart in-jokes and humour with appeal across all ages. Voiced by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz, the spoof fairytale script is as sharp as the animation. (90min)

King Kong (2005)

ITV1, 7.50pm

The director Peter Jackson gives the archetypal ape-meets-girl plot the Lord of the Rings treatment in this lavish blockbuster remake, which is laden with dazzling digital effects but far too long. Naomi Watts and Jack Black star while Jackson sticks all too faithfully to the original film’s 1930s melodrama trappings. (187min)

The Abyss (1989)

Channel 4, 9.55pm

James Cameron’s gung-ho underwater sci-fi thriller is dramatically flawed but full of eye-popping visual effects. A team of deep-sea oil drillers search for a lost submarine in an ocean trench, where they encounter mysterious marine monsters. Co-stars Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio performed most of their own stunts in the largest movie water tank ever built – before Cameron’s own Titanic, that is. (138min)

Tommy (1975)

BBC Two, 1.25am

The Who’s sprawling rock opera becomes a bombastic monument to garish 1970s kitsch in the hands of Ken Russell. The quasi-religious plotline may be familiar, with Roger Daltrey playing the lonely Tommy, rendered deaf, dumb and blind by an abusive adult world, only to achieve messianic fame as a pinball playing genius. Oliver Reed, Elton John, Tina Turner and Jack Nicholson feature in the superstar cast. (111min)

Ask the Dust (2006)

Channel 4, 1.50am

Best known for scripting Chinatown, the writer-director Robert Towne returned to prewar Los Angeles’s seedy underside in this glossy but inert adaptation of John Fante’s bittersweet novel. Colin Farrell’s struggling Italian-American writer begins a prickly romance with Salma Hayek’s fiery waitress, but neither star conveys much beyond stagy caricature. (117min)

Sweet November (2001)

ITV1, 2.35am

A remake of a little-known 1968 flop, Sweet November updates the tearjerking story with Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves in the lead roles. Theron plays a serial San Francisco seducer who reforms selfish men by sleeping with them for one month at a time – a tough punishment for her poor victims, obviously. Reeves plays her latest conquest, a slick adman who regains his soul after discovering Theron’s murky motives. (119min)

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