TV
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie from 1979 was an all-time sci-fi/horror classic, and even an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs – Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator, Prometheus, Alien: Romulus et al – hasn’t diluted the electrifying impact of the original.Now FX and Disney have shovelled a shed-load of money into this glossily-produced series for TV, written and directed by Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion etc). But can it boldly go where no Alien-related product has gone before?Er... not really, it's more a case of reshuffling themes from previous incarnations. Alien: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t really want to belong to the Buckley family, a star-crossed dynasty who run their fishing business out of Havenport, North Carolina. As Bree Buckley (daughter of Harlan and Belle) tells recently-discovered family member Shawn, “I wouldn’t wish us on anybody.”The family members all have their problems. For instance, Bree (Melissa Benoist, pictured below) is a recovering (with difficulty) addict, and she’s stricken by the memory of how she inadvertently burned down her home with her young child in it.As it happens, the family fishing operation is struggling to survive, and in order Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Having played Sherlock Holmes’s politically involved older brother Mycroft in the BBC’s hit crime series Sherlock, Mark Gatiss may not be an obvious candidate to now follow in the footsteps of the famous detective. But with his new murder mystery series Bookish, set in London in the aftermath of World War Two, the creator, writer and star of the six-part show has finally become a sleuth himself.“The period is very unusual,” he says over Zoom from Rimini, where the historic crime drama had its world premiere at the inaugural edition of the Italian Global Series Festival. “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. The 10-part Netflix series that Dunham and her English musician husband Luis Felber have created, Too Much, is just that: a welter of verbiage, weird characters and relentless squelchy sex – though the sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A mixture of legal drama, medical mystery and psychological thriller with creepy supernatural overtones, Insomnia sometimes seems to be trying to cram too much in, but it’s well worth sticking with it to the end to reap the full benefits. Not the least of its strengths are its classy production values and an excellent all-round cast, with Vicky McClure in the lead role of high-flying City lawyer Emma Averill, Leanne Best as her sister Phoebe, and Lyndsey Marshal throwing any number of flies into the ointment as Caroline Mitchell.Emma and her husband Robert (Tom Cullen) have two children,18- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Bob’s not the kind of guy you can say no to,” said Sting, reminiscing about the origins of 1984’s Band Aid charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. “He’s persistent.”He spoke, of course, of Bob Geldof, then best known as the singer with Dublin band the Boomtown Rats, but destined to be remembered as the driving force behind Band Aid and the subsequent massive Live Aid concerts which took place on both sides of the Atlantic in July 1985. Experts believe the shows were watched by 1.9 billion people (onstage at Wembley Stadium, pictured below).The Boomtown Rats had some success on the UK Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996 had been fraught with difficulties, including not just his increasingly ill-tempered on-track battle with Michael Schumacher, but also the sometimes less-than-wholehearted support he received from the Williams team. Indeed, the team had already announced they were replacing him before he won the 1996 title.Director Alex Holmes’s film often resembles a therapy session rather than a traditional documentary, with Hill sitting on a darkened set in front Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If somebody submitted a treatment for a new costume drama series set in the 1930s in which not just one but two fictitious sisters from a fading aristocratic family pair off with leading fascists, while the cousin warning them off these liaisons is a future British PM, the pitch meeting probably wouldn’t last that long. Yet Britbox’s Outrageous, a six-parter on the U+Drama channel, tells exactly this true extraordinary story, and tells it well. Even without the lavish budgets of other period projects, it looks the part, with spot-on interiors and costumes. It even gets to grip with the Read more ...