They say no good deed goes unpunished, so when New York restaurateur Jake Friedken (Jude Law) allowed his wayward and star-crossed brother Vince (Jason Bateman) back into his life, he might have expected to experience a little turbulence. Instead, he finds himself engulfed in a hair-raising struggle to save his career and even his life.While Vince has high-tailed it across country from Reno, where his encounter with a couple of con-artists found him running one of them over (twice) in a parking lot, Jake has been gee-ing up his staff for a visit by the New York Times restaurant critic. A Read more ...

Fifth time around, Slow Horses continues to show the rest of the field a clean pair of heels. Or hooves. The adventures of Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his peculiar little band of secret service misfits have come to exert a fierce stranglehold on the viewing public. Horses must be perilously close to being officially declared a cult.Anyway, this fifth series is derived from Mick Herron’s novel London Rules, and the specific London-ness of the show continues to be an indispensable component in its success. Where TV drama often fakes up a fictional not-quite-anywhereland, Horses remains Read more ...

Scripted by Belfast-born playwright David Ireland, Coldwater is a smart and addictive thriller, which manages to squeeze some fresh twists out of its murderous narrative. It also benefits hugely from an excellent cast firing on all cylinders, while also reaping the benefits of its Scottish rural locations.But our story begins in London, where the anti-hero, John (Andrew Lincoln), suffers a traumatic event at the local school playground. He watches a woman being violently assaulted by a raging maniac, but can’t bring himself to rush to her rescue. Instead he freezes, panics, and then runs away Read more ...

ITV continues its passion for docudramas about injustice, which you can’t blame it for after the rip-roaring success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The issue in I Fought the Law is, from one angle, of national (even International) importance, though compared to the persecution of hundreds of innocent postmasters, some of whom committed suicide, its cause is a rarer bird.The person fighting the law is Ann Ming (Sheridan Smith), a feisty mother from Billingham, near Middlesbrough, whose daughter Julie, her oldest child, goes missing in 1989. It takes over two months for her body to be Read more ...

Why isn’t Eve Myles a superstar? Though well known for her appearances in the likes of Torchwood, Broadchurch and the brilliant Keeping Faith, you’d imagine that by now she’d have been snapped up for some mega-budget extravaganza on Amazon or Apple TV or be romping around with Tom Cruise.But she obviously likes to keep close to her Welsh roots, as she does in The Guest, and it helps her deliver a power and authenticity that might be lost in the jungle of corporate streamer-land. She plays Fran Sharp, a wealthy businesswoman who lives in a splendid house in the country near Cardiff with her Read more ...

In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror purports to be the story of how the Norman monarch William (the titular Conqueror) and England’s King Harold found themselves locked in a battle to the death at Hastings, each having negotiated a fearsome labyrinth of plots, treachery, ambition and murder in order to become top dog on either side of the English Channel.But somehow, despite its rather distinguished cast, the drama obstinately refuses to catch fire. Where The Last Kingdom brilliantly evoked the Read more ...

Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV includes an Oscar nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, Hostage is a rather puzzling mix of political thriller and domestic drama which can never decide whether it’s serious or not.In the lead role of British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, Suranne Jones is called upon to do political battle with the French president Vivienne Toussaint (a cold and frosty Julie Delpy), and their fraught power-women exchanges give the show some of its best moments. Especially the bit where Toussaint bounces Dalton into a policy Read more ...

What would TV screenwriters do without drugs? In Flight, created by Mike Walden and Adam Randall, is yet another drama depicting the perils and pitfalls of getting sucked into the narcotics trade, though it does deliver a twist or two to distinguish it from earlier specimens.It revolves around Jo Conran (Katherine Kelly), a single mum who works as a flight attendant for an airline called Avalon. The fact that her job involves regular flights to various European and Far Eastern destinations means she could be very useful as a drugs courier, though this has never been her ambition. However, Read more ...

Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie from 1979 was an all-time sci-fi/horror classic, and even an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs – Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator, Prometheus, Alien: Romulus et al – hasn’t diluted the electrifying impact of the original.Now FX and Disney have shovelled a shed-load of money into this glossily-produced series for TV, written and directed by Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion etc). But can it boldly go where no Alien-related product has gone before?Er... not really, it's more a case of reshuffling themes from previous incarnations. Alien: Read more ...

Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...

Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...

As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily Read more ...