TV
Adam Sweeting
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air travel. This time, North China Air’s Flight 357, from London to Beijing, hasn’t been hijacked, but it has become the scene of a string of inexplicable murders, carried out by unknown assassin(s) as it cruises at 40,000 feet.At the centre of the drama is Dr Matthew Nolan (Richard Armitage), a vascular surgeon who has been attending a medical conference in Beijing. However, the usual litany of talks, meet-and-greets and 47-course meals is rudely interrupted by Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative strands thrash around like eels in a tank. We are back at the response unit in the old Belfast nick, though with a new recruit and a couple of old faces unexpectedly returning. [Spoiler alert for those who didn’t watch season one and ought to.] But the tightness of the writers’ grip has slackened.It’s a year on, and the rookie cops have bedded in. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. He followed that with another piece of writing about abuse, this time meted out by a female stalker, Baby Reindeer, which he performed at the Fringe and then at the Bush Theatre in 2019. Spliced together, these two traumatic experiences now form his bleak Netflix seven-parter of that same name. "Baby Reindeer" is the nickname given to the object of her obsession by a middle-aged woman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling French drama. Nonetheless, its story of a bizarre cult, a rapacious medical corporation and a trail of dead bodies stretching back through 30 years of history does somehow keep you coming back for more, if only to wonder how much more berserk proceedings can become.The opening scene is set in 1994, where a group of police in combat gear jump out of inflatable dinghies and advance towards a house, from which a man resembling a mashup of Charles Manson and Jesus Christ emerges, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. One this new adaptation presumably had in mind was creating an even more in-depth portrait of Tom Ripley, played by Andrew Scott, over eight 50-minute episodes. It’s also a change of pace visually, shot in moody black and white, though updated to 1961. Netflix’s resources are on full show, notably in its writer-director Steve Zaillian (Moneyball, The Irishman, The Night Of) and his Oscar- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis which probed his alarm-bell-jangling relationship with serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. And it doesn’t end there, since looming over the horizon is Amazon Prime’s three-part dramatisation of the same story, A Very Royal Scandal (starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson).Be all that as it may, Netflix got there first, with a Read more ...
David Nice
In the finale of the latest RuPaul extravaganza to make it to the BBC, our hostess asks each of the competitors “why does the world need drag now more than ever?” The question needs detailed answers as increasingly more intense hate is hurled against the age-old art around the world, and it’s clear that the finals, at least when not all-American, are more a love-in than a competition.Those who’ve resisted the Drag Race phenomenon until now should perhaps start towards the end of this or any other series. Not only will you get the best of what in the bring-em-back formulas are mostly also the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Industrious screenwriter Steven Knight has brought us (among many other things) Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes and even Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, but This Town may not be remembered as one of his finest hours. Here, we find Knight revisiting his Midlands background for a story that begins in 1981, during Margaret Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. There’s rioting on the streets, unemployment is soaring and Bobby Sands is on hunger strike in Belfast. Ska and Two Tone music are all the rage, and the soundtrack is littered with old faves like “The Tide is High”, “Pressure Drop”, “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The screenwriting debut of actor Andrew Buchan, Passenger ends up resembling a bunch of ingredients looking for a cake. While characters come out with such meta-observations as “this isn’t Twin Peaks” and “this isn’t Broadchurch” – Buchan having been one of the stars of Broadchurch – Passenger contains echoes of both of them, and rather louder ones of Happy Valley.Set in the fictional small town of Chadder Vale on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, it’s a tale about the friendships and antagonisms of a closely-knit community which seems to have a sinister cloud hanging over it. More than once Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring attempt to dramatise Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. A mind-bending sci-fi epic spanning multiple decades, while also reaching centuries into the past and future, it can scarcely be faulted for lack of ambition, but sometimes there's just too much going on to digest properly.The story opens in 1960s China, where the Cultural Revolution is burning down everything in its path with hideous brainwashed zeal. One of its countless victims is the physicist Ye Zhetai Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on 14 April 1865, five days after General Robert E Lee’s surrender at Appomatox signalled the end of the American Civil War. The ensuing chase to catch his killer, John Wilkes Booth, is the basis of Manhunt (based on James L Swanson’s book).Lincoln’s shooting at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC and subsequent death is the centrepiece of the opening episode, though this brutal and fateful act is not the most compelling part of the story. The “what happened?” turns out be less compelling than the who, how and why.Those follow later, as the drama unwinds Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome back to Guy Ritchie’s Geezerworld, familiar from such slices of lurid villainhood as Lock, Stock…, RocknRolla and The Gentlemen (the movie). The Gentlemen (the TV series) takes some cues from the similarly-named big-screen event from 2019, but becomes its own distinctive self as it unwinds across eight episodes.Mind you, it does display signs of mild schizophrenia. The first two episodes punch the clock at just over an hour, but then the running times throttle back to around the 40-minute mark. It’s as if Ritchie and his collaborators, who include co-writer Matthew Read and several Read more ...