TV
Eric, Netflix review - a fairytale of New YorkThursday, 06 June 2024
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Matthew Modine on 'Hard Miles', 40 years in showbusiness and safer cyclingSaturday, 01 June 2024
Maybe California-born Matthew Modine caught the movie bug courtesy of his father Mark, who used to manage drive-in theatres, but after bagging his first film role in John Sayles’s Baby It’s You (1983) he never looked back. Blessed with a gift of... Read more... |
Tokyo Vice, Series 2, BBC iPlayer review - an exciting ride that stretches credibilityThursday, 30 May 2024
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... Read more... |
The Beach Boys, Disney+ review - heroes and villains and good vibrationsFriday, 24 May 2024
It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Eddie Marsan and the American Revolution, posh boys and East End gangstersWednesday, 22 May 2024
He’s not the kind of actor who has paparazzi following him around Beverly Hills or staking out his yacht in St Barts, but Eddie Marsan, born into a working class family in Stepney in 1968, has amassed a list of acting credits that your average... Read more... |
Rebus, BBC One review - revival of Ian Rankin's Scottish 'tec hits the jackpotMonday, 20 May 2024
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has... Read more... |
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Disney+ review - how the boy from Sayreville, NJ conquered the worldTuesday, 07 May 2024
To mark the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s second-greatest gift to rock’n’roll, Disney+ have served up this sprawling four-part documentary which tells you more about Jon Bon Jovi and his band of brothers than you ever needed to know. Or, possibly... Read more... |
Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk-food thrillerMonday, 06 May 2024
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air travel. This time, North China Air’s Flight 357, from London to Beijing, hasn’t been hijacked, but it has become the... Read more... |
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop show despite a slacker structureTuesday, 23 April 2024
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.After an exhilarating start, its multiple narrative... Read more... |
Baby Reindeer, Netflix review - a misery memoir disturbingly presentedFriday, 19 April 2024
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. He followed that with another piece of... Read more... |
Anthracite, Netflix review - murderous mysteries in the French AlpsTuesday, 16 April 2024
Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling French drama. Nonetheless, its story of a bizarre cult, a rapacious medical corporation and a trail of dead bodies stretching back... Read more... |
Ripley, Netflix review - Highsmith's horribly fascinating sociopath adrift in a sea of noirSaturday, 06 April 2024
There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. One this new adaptation presumably had in mind... Read more... |
