What to watch this February: best TV and films out this month

Film: Loving ★★★★★

This film will make you cry. Loving is the true story of the interracial couple Mildred and Richard Loving, who were married in Washington D.C in 1958. When they returned to live in Virginia, a state that had stringent anti-miscegenation laws, their lives were turned upside-down. Starring Ruth Negga as Mildred and Joel Edgerton as Richard. Bring tissues.

Film: Tulip Fever

A tale of a grubby 17th Century Dutch painter becoming romantically entwined with his flawless muse, Tulip Fever is essentially 2017's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) plays a rich merchant with an oily beard; Alicia Vikander (The Light Between Oceans) plays his beautiful and bored wife; and Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines) plays the besotted portraitist that makes up the last point of the love triangle.

TV series: SS-GB, BBC One

London, November 1941. It's been 14 months since Germany has won the Battle of Britain and our Spitfire planes have been wrapped up as a gift from the occupying German army destined for a Russian general, as part of a Nazi-Soviet public declaration of friendship.

Based on Len Deighton's 1978 novel of the same name SS-GB asks how London might have looked if we'd lost the Second World War. It's premise is not a far cry from Amazon Prime's Man in the High Castle, but it's on BBC.

Film festival: My Twisted Valentine, Barbican Centre

Erotic, louche, daring, taboo-breaking and breath-taking cult-classics... So many Valentine's Day screenings in London tend not to be of these kinds of films.

Things are different at the Barbican -- where a series of vintage movies showcase everything electric and transgressive about love and lust.

Films such as Les Biches and Gun Crazy provide an antidote to the on-screen soppiness on elsewhere. Read more about the three day festival below.

Film: Moonlight

Based on the Tarell Alvin McCraney play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the Barry Jenkins' film Moonlight is all about dismantling gay stereotypes and questions what it is to be black and gay and contemporary America.

Moonlight is likely to be one of the most powerful and important movies of 2017.

Film: The Handmaiden ★★★★★

The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Stoker, Thirst) is an adaptation of Fingersmith, the much-lauded and awarded novel by Sarah Waters. The story has been transported from Victorian era Britain to 1930s Korea.

The action follows Sook-hee, a skilled pickpocket, who is coerced by a con-artist, the self-styled Count Fujiwara, into a sly plan to obtain the fortune of the Japanese heiress Lady Hideko.

Thrilling and enchanting in equal measure, this is one to keep an eye on.

TV series: Girls Season 6, Sky Atlantic

Lena Dunham's beloved, dirty and honest comedy about a group of friends in their 20s navigating the impossible waters of life in New York City, officially comes to an end in 2017 with the arrival of Girls season 6. Don't miss it.