Moon ★★★★
9.00-10.55pm Sony Movie Channel

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Since low-budget sleeper hit Moon was released in 2008, blockbusters from Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) and Ridley Scott (The Martian) have featured similarly stranded astronauts on other planets. However, Duncan Jones’s feature debut remains a thoughtful sci-fi gem – lighter on special effects and, in many ways, heavier on existential doom. Its antecedents stretch back to 2001: a Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Solaris, Alien and even 70s TV series Space: 1999, with Sam Rockwell perfectly cast as the lone contract operative at a lunar mining base who’s coming to the end of his three-year stint. I will hold back from giving away too much as the suspense element is key, but he has an accident, and what has been a compelling depiction of workaday routine and the vagaries of isolation shifts into thriller mode. The voice of Kevin Spacey as a HAL-like computer adds to the sense of unease, as the veneer of what’s going on fractures. I can watch this again and again.

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