One sometimes finds oneself wondering whether Harlan Coben is an author or a set of AI procedures designed to manufacture plots of ludicrous twistiness. Whatever he or it is, it’s managed to infatuate Netflix and Prime Video, who can’t stop turning this stuff into TV wallpaper (The Stranger, The Woods, Shelter etc). Richard Armitage quite often stars in them.Armitage isn’t in I Will Find You, but most of the usual Coben-esque traits are in evidence. There are frequent enigmatic flashbacks to past events which have paved the way for the present-day action, there are missing persons and altered Read more ...

You might think the spy thriller is a genre which has been worn out and abused to death, but this second series of The Agency is here to tell you otherwise. Once again penned by the prolific Butterworth brothers Jez and John-Henry, it brings us back to the CIA London station helmed by the laconic Bosko (Richard Gere) and his morose and curmudgeonly deputy Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright).The star turn among their agents is the man codenamed Martian (Michael Fassbender), who remains haunted by his love affair with Sudanese anthropologist Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Swift, pictured below with Read more ...

David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. An opening swoop towards London’s gleaming high-rise skyline ends at the building site where a Luftwaffe bomb is unearthed, snub nose shark-like in the soil. Initially disorienting, parallel tales follow. Police Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Read more ...

Strongroom is a film to be endured as much as enjoyed, Vernon Sewell’s low-budget thriller almost unbearable to watch in its final stages. Released in 1962 as a supporting feature, Strongroom depicts what happens when a bank heist goes badly wrong, leaving the branch manager and his secretary locked in a vault with just 12 hours of air. Unfolding over a long Easter weekend, the three gang members realise that if the bank staff suffocate, they’ll face a murder charge and capital punishment. Colin Gordon and Ann Lynn spend most of their screen time in perspiring in their cramped, Read more ...

What a strange little film, uncertain if it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or a comedic poke at the shibboleths of psychoanalysis, A Private Life is definitively a vehicle for Jodie Foster, comèdienne. The American pulls off an impeccable accent in her first French-speaking role, playing Dr Lillian Steiner, an expat psychiatrist who treats patients from her elegant Parisian home. Unmoored by the suicide of Paula, a patient whose husband blames Steiner for prescribing the fatal pills, the doctor becomes convinced that in fact murder was the cause of death.A Private Life looks lovely, Paris Read more ...

Would you want to marry a spy? After watching Betrayal, probably not.Writer David Eldridge has used the paradigm of the secret world as a means of exploring relationships both personal and professional, and how one is liable to corrode and distort the other. A quote from the 13th Century Persian poet Rumi is dropped in as a clue – “the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell and broke into pieces.”The Persian link is apposite, since the story orbits around an Iranian plot to stage a terrorist outrage somewhere in the Manchester area. Our somewhat flawed protagonist is MI5 agent John Read more ...

Location, location, location... a tangible sense of place and local identity can make or break a TV drama, and Under Salt Marsh exploits this to the full. It’s a haunting murder mystery, triggered by the discovery of the body of eight-year-schoolboy Cefin in a drainage ditch near the small town of Morfa Halen (that’s Welsh for “salt marsh”). Its aura of foreboding and sadness is infinitely enhanced by being set amid beautiful but austere Welsh countryside and coastline, particularly the marshy flatlands which give it its title. Cefin’s death takes on extra layers of significance Read more ...

The typical Jason Statham character is a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, maybe as a hitman, a safe-cracker or a former member of some special forces unit. Statham knows what he’s good at, and it’s provided him with a modest living (he’s said to be worth $100m, and can command fees of $20m per film).His latest, Shelter, is a chip off the old block. Statham plays Michael Mason, a taciturn loner with a dark and secret past, who lives in frugal isolation in a derelict lighthouse on a barren lump of rock in the Hebrides. He has an Alsatian dog for company, and amuses himself in a Read more ...

Evil capitalists are in the cross-hairs of this six-part thriller, conceived and mostly written by Sotiris Nikias. Possibly not the most original of villains, but they serve well enough as the basis for a story which takes a dive into the unscrupulous underbelly of London’s Square Mile and then spreads its tentacles around a cluster of assorted reprobates and untrustworthy characters.Our heroine is Zara Dunne (Sophie Turner), who works at pension fund managers Lochmill Capital, based in a swanky new skyscraper somewhere near the Lloyd’s building and the Gherkin. But while the company’s high- Read more ...

Analysts tell us that the UK’s top-rated TV show this Christmas was the King’s speech, with the Strictly Christmas special coming in a mere third. If this means anything at all, perhaps it’s just indicative of the bafflingly-expanding TV universe where it’s becoming impossible to keep tabs on everything that’s out there on a seemingly countless number of channels (and who on earth decided that “U&Drama” was a name to titillate the punters?). Even newspaper TV critics can’t seem to agree on what’s worth reviewing.But on the subject of U&Drama, they at least deserve a tip of the hat for Read more ...

Hell has no fury like a stan scorned, as an Eminem song memorably established with respect to obsessed fanboys in the pop world, and this visually nimble not-quite-thriller shows us the further perils of celebrity disciples who get the hump.Britain’s Archie Madekwe plays Oliver, an up-and-coming music artist in LA, provider of pleasurable late-century-influenced pop and surrounded by the usual crew of Gen Z mates and loafers. In a clever opening scene, he gloms onto a nervous, shifty, college-dodging worker in a clothes store, and somehow the gulf in power and personality between them makes Read more ...

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident is a shattering absurdist anti-caper – a kind of minimalist take on It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World inspired by Iran’s ongoing tragedy. His country's top director and one of the sharpest thorns in the Islamic Republic’s regime, Panahi was promoting his Palme’ d’Or-winner in New York last Monday when Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment for “propagandia activities”. He’s also banned from overseas travel for two years and from joining social and political organisations. The Supreme Leader and his judges Read more ...