Watch inspector Reid’s return to Ripper Street, catch up with Forrest Gump, marvel at The New World and more stunning things to see

Thursday 7.28
Matthew Macfadyen’s self-righteous detective inspector Reid retired to the seaside with his daughter at the end of Ripper Street Season 3, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find him back in 1897 Whitechapel at the start of Season 4, which premieres tonight on BBC America. For a period piece, Ripper Street features lots of modern storytelling conventions and always wraps its episodes up a little too tidily. But the characterizations from Macfadyen and co-stars Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg make it eminently watchable. To catch up, stream Seasons 1 through 3 on Amazon Prime.

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Friday 7.29
Netflix has become a creative breeding ground with financial support for its ever-growing roster of talent. Orange Is the New Black writer Sian Heder’s feature film debut, Talullah, premiered at Sundance in January but was bought by Netflix before any other studio could step in. It stars Ellen Page as a young woman who kidnaps a baby from its negligent mother (Tammy Blanchard) and tells her boyfriend’s mother (Allison Janney) that the baby is her own. Its available to stream today.

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Saturday 7.30
Will history repeat itself? Time has not been kind to Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump in the years since its massive box-office success and game-changing, face-robbing digital VFX. In 1994, most found Tom Hanks’ idiot savant — who bumbles his way through the CliffsNotes of late-20th-century history — charming and enjoyed seeing the complicated issues of the day through a simpler lens. Pop into the KC Public Library (14 West 10th Street) at 1:30 this afternoon to see how the movie plays in today’s fear-based, Trump-charged political climate. It ain’t pretty.

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Sunday 7.31
The war movie that set the example for all anti-war movies, All Quiet on the Western Front, is showing at 4 p.m. at Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet. Lewis Milestone won Best Director at the 1930 Academy Awards for this moving and artistic film, which was eventually banned by a war-hungry Hitler from being shown in Germany. The complete version was digitally remastered and restored by the Library of Congress five years ago. Why not start the morning with some living history at the WWI Museum and cap it off here?

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Monday 8.1
The other day a friend told me he had forgotten that Michael Keaton was in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and was pleasantly surprised by how straightforward it was for a Tarantino film. I told him it was the iconic filmmaker’s only adaptation, and that the 1997 movie was based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which is part of the reason the dialogue crackles even more than usual for QT. For part one of a funny and surprisingly romantic double-feature filled with killers, criminals and a couple truly decent people fighting off their more base instincts, watch it on Blu-ray or rent it on Amazon, iTunes or Google Play.

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Tuesday 8.2
Follow up Jackie Brown with Out of Sight, Steven Soderbergh’s masterful 1998 Leonard adaptation, which also stars Keaton as over-confident ATF agent Ray Nicolette, albeit in a much smaller role. George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez headline this crime caper and generate real sparks, with a hilarious supporting cast including Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle and Steve Zahn. Looking back on this one-two Leonard punch almost 20 years later, these are two of the finest crime movies of all time.

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Wednesday 8.3
The Criterion Collection’s three-disc Blu-ray of Terrence Malick’s under-appreciated 2005 film, The New World, is proof that the format is still the best way for cinephiles to enjoy movies at home. Included are three cuts of this beautifully rendered historical epic, which is so visually stunning that it would probably play equally well as a silent film. Language only complicates things between John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), but new interviews with both stars and crew members illuminate Malick’s process and go into thematic detail and the reason for three versions of the film.

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Eric Melin is the editor of Scene-Stealers.com and president of the KC Film Critics Circle.