Claire Foy
Emma Dibdin
You remember Upstairs Downstairs – the lavish 2010 period drama-cum-soap based around servants and their masters that had the misfortune of not being named Downton Abbey. Making its entrance some three months after ITV’s series despite being filmed first, Upstairs played like the indignant, overshadowed elder sibling to Downton’s effervescent, effortlessly successful young upstart. After all, in a drama war between the BBC and ITV, there can’t be many who were betting on the latter coming out on top in either ratings or critical terms, especially given the 40-year-old pedigree of the Upstairs Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's quite a bit to admire in DR Hood's debut feature. There's the cast for a start, headed by nascent superstar Benedict Cumberbatch alongside Brit-dram It-girl Claire Foy. Beguiling, too, is the piece's setting in the fenlands of East Anglia (quite near Mildenhall airbase, one would guess, judging by the eerie shots of American aircraft drifting overhead). It's countryside which never quite makes its mind up whether it's starkly beautiful or menacingly primitive.The same fault line of doubt runs down the middle of the marriage of Dawn and David (Foy and Cumberbatch). The opening Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s sweeping saga was compressed into a single film. And it was brought forward in time to the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be whipped off in a flash.As usual with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They've remade everything else, so what took them so long to get around to Hawaii Five-0? Maybe the exotic Hawaiian locations of JJ Abrams's Lost helped to trigger flashbacks of Steve McGarrett & co, which would explain why Abrams's henchmen Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are co-producers of the new Five-0. And why Daniel Dae Kim, who played Jin in Lost, reappears here as Chin Ho Kelly.The refreshing thing about Five-0 (revisited) is that while it has been given a brisk 21st-century spring clean, with international terrorism, people-smuggling and a blast of ultra-modern spook Read more ...