tv
The Tourist, BBC One review - gripping Outback thriller from the Williams brothersSunday, 02 January 2022
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback. Read more...
|
Best of 2021: TVTuesday, 28 December 2021
There's so much stuff on TV, in all its many multi-streaming hats, that I somehow haven't got around to watching Succession. Apparently it's the best TV show ever made. Oh well, there's bound to be another one along in a minute. Theartsdesk's eagle-eyed reviewers have found plenty to amuse themseves with elsewhere during 2021, and we parade our particular predilections below. Adam Sweeting Read more... |
A Very British Scandal, BBC One review - the wild life and times of the Duchess of ArgyllMonday, 27 December 2021
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw? Read more... |
The Amazing Mr Blunden, Sky Max / The Mezzotint, BBC Two reviews - blundering Blunden eclipsed by M R JamesFriday, 24 December 2021
Friday night was Mark Gatiss night. Read more... |
The Girl Before, BBC One review - high-tech dream home contains many a heartacheMonday, 20 December 2021
Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect? Read more... |
You Don't Know Me, BBC One review - true love meets inner-city crime waveTuesday, 07 December 2021
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”. Read more... |
Hellbound, Netflix review - supernatural assassins usher in an age of terrorFriday, 03 December 2021
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Read more... |
The Beatles: Get Back, Disney+ review - 1969 revisited in Peter Jackson's three-part documentaryThursday, 25 November 2021
A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now. Read more... |
Death of England: Face to Face, National Theatre at Home review - anti-racist trilogy ends with a bangTuesday, 23 November 2021
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown. Read more... |
Dopesick, Disney+ review - the harrowing inside story of America's OxyContin scandalSaturday, 20 November 2021
“Drug companies are supposed to be honest,” says a lady from the Department of Justice, explaining why the US Food and Drug Administration had been treating the pharmaceutical industry with a light, indeed barely detectable, regulatory touch. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Director Thom Zimny has become the audio-visual Boswell to Bruce Springsteen’s Samuel Johnson, having made...
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost...
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after...
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006...
Could melancholia be an elixir of creative youth? Or is it that sad people were never really that youthful, so age suits them? Certainly it seems...
All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another...
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos...
Even by Stanley Kubrick’s standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. After starting it off as a...
Last time I saw the lovelorn Cyclops from Handel’s richly turbulent cantata, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, he was in a warehouse at Trinity...