medical
Trauma, ITV, review - surgically imprecise revenge dramaThursday, 15 February 2018
When you’re hot, you’re hot. In the past two years Mike Bartlett has had the following works staged or broadcast: Wild, a play about Edward Snowden at Hampstead Theatre; Albion, a three-hour neo-Chekhovian state-of-the-nation play at the Almeida; an... Read more... |
DVD: The Death of Louis XIVTuesday, 21 November 2017
Albert Serra has earned himself the directorial moniker “the Catalan king of stasis”, and nothing in The Death of Louis XIV is going to dispel such a reputation – if anything, he has honed that characteristic approach further, concentrating this... Read more... |
Oliver Sacks: The River of Consciousness review - a luminous final collection of essaysSunday, 29 October 2017
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many... Read more... |
Billion Dollar Deals That Changed Your World, BBC Two review - Big Pharma gets a diagnosis: it’s sickThursday, 28 September 2017
“What if the way people understand the world is wrong? What if it isn’t politicians that shape the way people live their day-to-day lives, but secret business deals?” This is the question at the heart – and at the start – of Jacques Peretti’s... Read more... |
Trust Me, BBC One, series finale review - drama about fake doctor was also pretendingWednesday, 30 August 2017
Trust Me made an eponymous plea to the audience. Its implausible premise – that a nurse might steal a doctor’s identity and land a job in A&E – called for your credulity. Around the broadcast of the drama's first episode on BBC One, sundry... Read more... |
Trust Me, BBC One review - Jodie Whittaker's tense medical check-upWednesday, 09 August 2017
Even the canniest scheduler at BBC One couldn’t have arranged things so propitiously. Jodie Whittaker was already filming the medical drama Trust Me when she was cast as you know Who. Trolls unhappy at a female i/c the Tardis will have their quips... Read more... |
Maudie review - intriguing and irritating in turnFriday, 04 August 2017
The little-known Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis is the Maudie of the title of Aisling Walsh's grim-faced biopic, which feels frustratingly incomplete where it really counts. Sally Hawkins's committed occupancy of this sweet-faced if largely... Read more... |
Grandad, Dementia and Me, BBC One review - no easy solutions to terrifying mental conditionWednesday, 12 July 2017
The title gave us the true-life plot: this was a grandson’s filmed narrative of something that will touch us all, through acquaintance, friend, family and perhaps ourselves falling victim to some form of dementia. It's a word that covers a myriad of... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Henry Marsh - Admissions: A Life in Brain SurgerySunday, 07 May 2017
Is it true that the blob of jelly resembling convoluted grey matter that we carry around in our skulls is really what we are? And how we are, and why? This is the profound question that is obliquely omnipresent in Henry Marsh’s second book on his... Read more... |
All Our Children review - shameful historical period horrifies anewSaturday, 06 May 2017
How do you tell a story as complex as the eugenics movement, which is pursued afresh in writer-director Stephen Unwin's new play All Our Children? Its idealistic origins lie in Britain with Francis Galton in 1883, before leading to forced... Read more... |
Heal the Living review - 'lots of emotion, not enough life'Thursday, 27 April 2017
Three teenage boys meet at dawn. One of them, blonde and beautiful Simon (Gabin Verdet), jumps out of his girlfriend’s window and rides his bike through the dark Lyon streets to meet the others in their van. They drive almost silently to the beach,... Read more... |
Dispatches: Under Lock and Key, Channel 4Thursday, 02 March 2017
Five years ago BBC Panorama went undercover, sending in a reporter with a hidden camera to expose the horror going on at Winterbourne View, a hospital for people with learning disabilities and/or autism. There was outrage as the nation watched... Read more... |
