Olivia Colman
Markie Robson-Scott
30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the dishes or change the sheets (stained sheets are of particular importance here).Which is why young Berkshire squire and future lawyer Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) is alone in the imposing family house, his parents having gone out to a lunch at a hotel in Henley, and why Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young; Shirley), an orphaned maid at a neighbouring Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The 91st Academy Awards began with a rousing concert appearance from Queen to kick off a show from which Bohemian Rhapsody led the field with four trophies. Three host-free hours later, the ceremony got a surprise shot of adrenaline from the unexpected Oscar that went to The Favourite’s Olivia Colman for playing a queen. What came between was a scattershot affair marked out by numerous Oscar firsts, repeated standing ovations – from that Queen opener to Rami Malek’s prize for playing Freddie Mercury – and a shorter and sometimes sharper Oscars: a good half-hour or more had been shaved from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It can be fascinating to see ourselves as others see us. In this case, Athens-born director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster) brings his acute eye to the English country-house period drama in a scintillatingly warped portrait of the dysfunctional court of Queen Anne.It’s the beginning of the 18th century, and England is struggling with the increasing costs of war with the French. The ageing and mentally erratic Anne (Olivia Colman) quails at the prospect of decision-making as preening politicians screech and chatter around her, wrestling for political advantage and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kenneth Branagh, like his Poirot, cares about cutlery. The director and detective’s fastidiousness both find their ideal home on the Orient Express, where waiters measure fork placement with the precision of Poirot’s sacred monster of a moustache. This Murder on the Orient Express follows 1974’s Sidney Lumet version and the train itself in ensuring its customers’ well-being with well-appointed luxury. Finding a proper film star in almost every compartment only adds to the steam age glamour.Branagh’s glaring problem is that the audiences most likely to see Agatha Christie at the cinema will Read more ...
David Benedict
“Take your pick. Who shall we talk to first?” DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and DS Miller (Olivia Colman) had their three prime suspects waiting for them in custody. The fact that none of them proved to be the guilty party was what was wrong not only with their investigation but with the construction of the third and final series of the dramatically serious, but seriously uneven, Broadchurch (ITV).On the absolute plus side was the handling of the subject matter. Following extensive consultation and research with women’s organisations and other bodies working in the area of rape, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Broadchurch was a gigantic hit four years ago, though 2015’s follow-up suffered a bit of a slow puncture. Can this third and supposedly final outing restore the show to its former glories?Episode one made a tidy and reasonably tense starter, though with seven more to go, you knew that whatever happened here was merely slapping on the undercoat for the (presumably) astounding and stunning revelations scheduled for later on by writer Chris Chibnall. Also, revisiting the same picturesque Dorset coastal town for the third time inevitably means its original freshness and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Have you seen Fleabag yet? If not, here’s the one-word review: brilliant. You need three hours to watch the lot on the iPlayer, which is BBC Three’s main address these days. Do come back afterwards and read this longer appreciation, which contains spoilers.So, Fleabag. Brilliant. It was written by and stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the eponymous singleton, and began life as a fringe play at Edinburgh before moving south. Like Miranda it features a dark-haired single woman making confiding asides to camera. It’s as if she’s her own Greek chorus supplying a running commentary from the wings. ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So at a stroke, The Night Manager has proved that appointment-to-view television is not yet dead in the age of Netflix, and that the BBC can do itself a favour in battling against the best American dramas if it can find a US production partner (AMC in this case). Perhaps its most vital lesson was that if you want to put bums on seats, pay whatever it takes to get Tom Hiddleston's up on the screen.High fives for director Susanne Bier, who ensured that this sixth and final episode comfortably sustained the tension so successfully spun across the preceding five, and powered thrillingly to a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the 2011 "Arab Spring". Here we encountered the fastidiously tailored Jonathan Pine, the titular night manager of the Nefertiti hotel, a man who keeps his head while all around him is panic, gunfire and explosions.Pine's journey is going to be the mainspring of this six-part series, and judging by the opener, the casting of Tom Hiddleston is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story. The proposition of The Lobster is a future society where being single is regarded as a crime. Those found to be alone, even if they’re newly widowed like our hero, John (Colin Farrell), are arrested and despatched to a rural hotel, where they have 45 days to find a partner amongst the other guests. Punishment, for those who fail, is to be transformed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.Television, in the shape of BBC drama Five Daughters (2010), is where the story of the murder victims was first told. London Road has widescreen moments, particularly at Read more ...
Matt Wolf
So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is doubly extraordinary when one considers that the widely acclaimed theatre production from 2011 was anomalous even as a stage show, let alone transposed to the screen. A piece of verbatim theatre conceived very much without take-home numbers but scored to the jagged, often discordant music of the composer Adam Cork, London Road seemed to want to Read more ...