TV
Adam Sweeting
Fans of Call the Midwife (which is currently “taking a break” after the conclusion of Series 15) will no doubt recall, with a nostalgic tear, Ella Bruccoleri’s performance as Sister Frances, which she sustained from 2018-2022. Some said she was nuts to walk away from such a well-loved show, but Ms Bruccoleri sensed that it was time to strike out for pastures new.She has also previously appeared in The Last Kingdom, Bridgerton, Bookish, Down Cemetery Road and Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, but her career is about to go up a gear or two. Viewers will be able to see why when she appears in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Another day, another few million bucks for Taylor Sheridan. Hot on the heels of Marshals, his latest Yellowstone spin-off, his inexorable march through the TV schedules continues with this saga of the Clyburn family. Previously they called New York home, but thanks to a sudden catastrophe they find themselves moving to the huge spaces and epic scenery of Montana's Madison River Valley. You could call it melodrama, and at times it threatens to go the whole hog and turn into soap, but The Madison does have the gift of watchability. It also delivers a hefty jolt of star power, in the shape Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Berlin always makes a flavourful setting for labyrinthine stories of betrayal and deception (see Le Carre and Len Deighton for further details), and it doesn’t disappoint in this absorbing German-made thriller. Writer Paul Coates and director Lennart Ruff have constructed a taut and twisty narrative that gradually pulls together various themes dating back many years, set in a cool and chilly-looking Berlin.The city’s notorious Wall has ceased to exist, but ghosts and murky echoes from the old East-West past still haunt the protagonists.The action kicks off with the arrival of an unknown man, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers.This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines. Max Verstappen, for one, doesn’t like them much.Drive to Survive has been instrumental in turning F1 into a vast global Read more ...
graham.rickson
Journalist Daniel Farson’s meteoric rise is neatly outlined on this disc, containing 14 of the short television films he presented for the fledgling ITV channel Associated-Rediffusion between 1957 and 1963. BFI archive curator William Fowler is right to compare Farson to Louis Theroux, and Farson’s ability to remain (mostly) straight-faced and respectful, no matter how outlandish the claims made by his interview subjects, is one of his most endearing qualities. There’s a telling quote from an ITV producer in the booklet accompanying this BFI release, Peter Hunt noting that Farson had “a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The brainchild of Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, this is a strange and tortuous tale which defies easy categorisation. There’s plenty of humour in it but it isn’t a comedy, and it also lays out a long trail of tragedy and pain spanning generations. You might argue that there’s a bit of redemption on offer, but then again you might not.Anyway, the narrative revolves around three women in their late thirties, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Robyn (Sinead Keenan), close friends from childhood and now living in Belfast. Their old bonds are rekindled when they’re invited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In his illustrious career, director Michael Waldman has profiled all manner of divas, from Elizabeth Taylor and Lord Byron to Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. So why not Tony Blair?His three-part series traces Blair’s story from his schooldays at Fettes College in Edinburgh to the present day, although perhaps not all points in between, with a string of contributors (alongside plenty of Blair himself) including Jack Straw, Clare Short, former Labour supporter Robert Harris, David Miliband, Harriet Harman, Jonathan Powell and more. Peter Mandelson delivers some typically slippery Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Somewhere in the bowels of the BBC, far away from the overheated stories of serial killers and female mutilation that clamour for the audience’s attention elsewhere on British telly, there is an oasis of calm. This little patch is the fiefdom of Mackenzie Crook.Yet Crook for me represents life as most people live it, full of mundane domestic duties and quiet pleasures. His characters are the ones you see down the pub, operating the supermarket tills, loitering in workspaces with not quite enough to do. Crook’s career was launched in one such workplace, The Office, then boosted by a run in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...