TV
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV viewers can hardly complain about a lack of choice these days, though they might baulk at funding an ever-lengthening list of subscriptions.There are some who argue, for example, that it’s worth paying for Apple TV+ solely to gain access to the excellent Slow Horses, whose third series has just concluded. Others may contend that you should stump up for Disney+ to see Only Murders in the Building, a delicious flashback to old Broadway and elegant Forties-style film comedies.Despite all that, you could still have spent the year enjoying a selection of admirable dramas from good old BBC One. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the follow-up to 2020’s The Kemps: All True, in which rock satirist Rhys Thomas assessed the Spandau Ballet boys as the band reached its 40th anniversary. This time, we rejoin Thomas as he spends a year as a fly on the wall in the chaotic lives of Martin and Gary, culminating in their plans to appear in the BBC’s New Year celebrations as 2024 dawns.The bogus rockumentary is an enticing format, but a notoriously difficult one to pull off. News has reached us that Rob Reiner is making Spinal Tap 2, but few seriously believe it can top the 1984 original (the only film on the Internet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Well at least they haven’t changed the identity of the killer this time around, but the BBC’s new version of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel has been modified in other ways. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meenu Gaur have opted to move the story into the mid-1950s, introducing themes of racism, class prejudice and capitalist exploitation. And you thought it was just a tidy little whodunnit.Labouring under this narrative burden is the protagonist Luke Fitzwilliam, who Christie wrote as a retired colonial policeman. Here, he’s reborn as a regional attache from Nigeria who’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They called Noël Coward “The Master”, and Barnaby Thompson's 90-minute documentary marking 50 years since his death reminded us why. Though there was nothing here in the way of hitherto unknown revelations, the tale of how a boy who left school at nine and had no musical training yet became one of the world’s most prolific playwrights and composers undoubtedly has something fantastical about it.With a commentary by Alan Cumming, quotations from Coward’s own writings voiced by Rupert Everett and bags of time-travelling period footage, the film pieced together the story of this son of an out-of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having previously brought us adaptations of M R James’s ghost stories, reviving the BBC tradition inaugurated by Lawrence Gordon Clark in the 1970s, Mark Gatiss has now turned to a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle for his annual Christmas chiller. With its cast of upper-crust academics amid the shadowy staircases and wood-panelled studies of Old College, Oxford in the 1880s, it makes a fine addition to the canon.Recruiting a stalwart cast was a wise precaution. Kit Harington is at centre stage as Abercrombie Smith, who is studying medicine and seems assured of an illustrious career. Though, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just one, but two Santas in this agreeable seasonal romp. It’s set in small-town Northern Ireland, where single mum Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to bring up her two young sons, Mikey (Bamber Todd) and Sean (Joshua McLees). Her job at the Stuff for a Pound shop is barely keeping food on the family table, her boss Mr Brady (Lloyd Hutchinson) is a bully and a liar, and her son Mikey is exhibiting anti-social tendencies (by blowing up the school Christmas tree, for instance).A wonderful life it isn’t, but it suddenly becomes a bit more exciting when the local Ballycopse Bank is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The original title of this French crime drama was Pax Massilia, a reference to the classical roots of its setting in what is now known as Marseille. Dating back to the 6th Century BC, it’s supposedly the oldest city in France. An atmospheric mix of architectural styles, dramatic views, a Mediterranean climate and multiple ethnicities, it makes the perfect stage for this fast-paced and sometimes horrifically violent thriller.It’s directed by Olivier Marchal, an ex-cop whose CV includes Braquo and 36 Quai des Orfèvres. And while the eternal struggle between police and thieves is hardly the most Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its first series in 2021, Vigil delivered a claustrophobic though frequently absurd tale of murder and Russian spies aboard a British nuclear submarine. This time around it’s the RAF under the spotlight, though its name has mysteriously been changed to the British Air Force.Is this a sly attempt to erase the monarchy, or perhaps a legal tactic to avoid problems with depicting the real air force? Specifically, we’re dealing here with the drone operations of the BAF (as nobody refers to it), both in Scotland and at its Al Shawka base in the little-known Middle Eastern country of Wudyan. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture and gripped by organised crime.Written by Peter McKenna and co-created by Ciaran Donnelly, Kin is the story of the Kinsella family and their fractious partnership with ominous crime lord Eamon Cunningham (Ciaran Hinds). The Kinsellas make their living by selling drugs supplied by Cunningham, so they’re at his beck and call. It’s a master-and- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was as long ago as January last year that the prolific Williams brothers, Jack and Harry, delivered their absorbing Australian Outback thriller The Tourist. Hitherto, product seemed to have been pouring out of them almost hourly, whether it was Liar, The Missing and Baptiste or The Widow, Rellik and Angela Black.Anyway, after this little sabbatical, here they are again with this six-part mystery, a whimsical fable about luck (or the absence of it), fate, memory and delusion. It also contains a little more than its fair share of violence, and the cold-blooded massacre of a whole police Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A man is taking his little dog for a late-night walk. This being the opening scene of The Crown’s final season, when the illuminated Eiffel Tower looms up at the end of his street we know exactly where we are, and exactly what the date is. Sure enough, the man sees a Mercedes screech past into the tunnel at the Pont de l’Alma and shortly afterwards hears the hideous impact of metal on concrete and the lonely accusatory sound of a stuck car horn (Polanski’s Chinatown got there first with that eerie detail). The show’s first four episodes, now available (the second chunk arrives on 14 Read more ...