terrorism
Adam Sweeting
The sense of crisis gathering over Spook Central in the last few episodes finally burst through this season finale like a Krakatoa-style cataclysm. Any lingering hopes that Richard Armitage’s Lucas North – the man we now know was really John Bateman – wasn’t really a black-hearted killer were brutally dashed. There was no more wriggle room. Bateman was bad to the bone.He blew up the British embassy in Dakar in 1995 and he murdered the real Lucas North. We’d watched him as he coldly allowed a young American cryptanalyst to bleed to death, just because she’d had the misfortune to overhear him Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The full-length version of Olivier Assayas's saga of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Venezuelan super-terrorist Carlos, was originally a three-part series for French TV and runs to five-and-a-half hours. Even the "short" cinema cut runs to two-and-a-half hours. Yet the director still felt it necessary to preface his opus with the warning that since many of Carlos's activities remained "grey areas" shrouded in mystery and ambiguity, it would be best to regard the film as fiction.Thus, you're never entirely certain what you've signed up to. The period detail, interpolated news footage recounting Read more ...
Jasper Rees
But the theme of not knowing is by no means confined to the agony of uncertainty. Brenda Blethyn plays Elizabeth, a mother who sees the 7/7 bombings on the news and instinctively picks up the phone to check, as millions of other parents will have on that day, if her daughter is alive and well. When no reply comes to several increasingly anxious messages, she comes to London and is gradually forced to confront the truth that she no longer has any idea who her daughter is, nor what sort of changing society she lives in.London River is in effect a two-hander, but one in which the characters Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Chris Ryan and Andy McNab are the Pepsi and Coca Cola of gung-ho, modern SAS war fiction, a lucrative genre that these one-man brands have carved up so effectively between them that it would take a gate-crasher of Nick Clegg-like proportions to threaten their duopoly.Both men retain their pseudonymous existence, more for the self-publicising drama of it than for security reasons - although Ryan rather ludicrously asserts that his life would be at risk if his real identity was revealed. Literary critics aren’t that savage, surely.Admittedly I have never read any of Ryan’s books, although I did Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley. So what of his feature-film debut, Four Lions, which he directed and co-wrote with Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Peep Show fame)?Well it has the Morris trademark of a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.Interestingly, even such complete novices at the free elections game as the Afghans had beaten the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's over-egging it a bit to equate Krautrock with the entire rebirth of Germany. It's also slightly jarring to entitle the film Krautrock when its narrator then blames the World War Two-obsessed British music press for inventing such a disparaging term (cue supplementary evidence of Spike Milligan and John Cleese pretending to be Nazis.)Nonetheless, I liked this film so much I watched it twice. There were loads of insightful and entertaining interviews, and most of the music was great, though the extracts weren't long enough. In fact the whole film wasn't long enough, and how often do Read more ...