fri 04/10/2024

TV drama

The Penguin, Sky Atlantic review - power, corruption, lies and prosthetics

Is there no limit to the number of times the comic book heroes and villains from Marvel and DC can be recycled? HBO’s The Penguin (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a spin-off from Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman, which starred Robert Pattinson in the...

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Nightsleeper, BBC One review - strangers on a runaway train

“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing...

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The Perfect Couple, Netflix review - an inconvenient death ruins lavish Nantucket wedding

Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral...

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Slow Horses, Season 4, Apple TV+ review - Gary Oldman returns as the 'gross and inappropriate' Jackson Lamb

News reaches us that Gary Oldman has mysteriously been vetoed from playing George Smiley in a new film version of Smiley’s People, despite his Oscar-nominated performance as John le Carre’s wiley spymaster in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Oldman...

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theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'

Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre...

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Sherwood, Series 2, BBC One review - maybe time isn't such a great healer

The first series of James Graham’s Sherwood, shown in June 2022, introduced us to the Nottinghamshire town of Ashfield, a former mining community devastated by pit closures and the miserable aftermath of the 1984 miners’ strike. The town was torn by...

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Lady in the Lake, Apple TV+ review - a multi-layered Baltimore murder mystery

Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political...

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The Turkish Detective, BBC Two review - a bad business in the Bosphorus

Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks...

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The Night Caller, Channel 5 review - all he hears is radio ga ga

Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a...

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Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+ review - you read the book and saw the movie...

Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the...

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Eric, Netflix review - a fairytale of New York

New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head. It’s here that the brilliant...

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Tokyo Vice, Series 2, BBC iPlayer review - an exciting ride that stretches credibility

It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert...

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