sun 25/05/2025

tv

Kathy Burke's All Woman, Channel 4 review - warts and all

Owen Richards

What’s the next level above national treasure? We’ll need a name for it by the end of All Woman, Kathy Burke’s new Channel 4 documentary.

Read more...

Keeping Faith, Episode 4 Series 2, BBC One review - murders aplenty

Owen Richards

Life on the Welsh coast isn’t getting any easier: defendant Madlen was found guilty of murder, husband Evan was coming home from prison, and Faith had just given Steve Baldini a rather uncomfortable snog on the beach. She’s probably pining for that first series now, at least the hubby was out of the picture.

Read more...

This Way Up, Channel 4 review - hilarity with a dark undercurrent

Markie Robson-Scott

“Get those worksheets in by Monday or I will Brexit the lot of you,” says turbo-charged teacher Aine (Aisling Bea: The Fall, Gap Year) to her London TEFL class. Her students have just enjoyed a stimulating lesson built around the Kardashian family tree. “Kim is the…” Aine waits for the answer. “Yes, well done, the second eldest. And Khloé is the…yes, the middle one. She was the youngest until along came Kendall and Kylie.”

Read more...

I Am Hannah, Channel 4 review - last in trilogy leaves us dangling

Adam Sweeting

In the final instalment of Dominic Savage’s trilogy of stand-alone dramas for Channel 4, Gemma Chan took the title role of a single woman in her mid-thirties, struggling with awkward choices about motherhood,...

Read more...

Euphoria, Sky Atlantic review - teenage nervous breakdown

Adam Sweeting

Being a teenager used to be fun, allegedly, but for the young cast of HBO’s controversial new hit series Euphoria it looks more like a nightmare ride through a theme park of bad trips.

Read more...

Inside the Secret World of Incels, BBC One review - involuntary celibacy, violence and despair

Markie Robson-Scott

A sad story of lonely men, Simon Rawles's atmospheric and beautifully shot documentary has no narration, apart from the occasional faint, off-camera question from the interviewer. This makes everything more depressing. We’re alone on a nightmare ride, starting with Catfishman. “I catfish females.

Read more...

The Chef's Brigade, BBC Two review - you're in the army now

Adam Sweeting

While a spot of home cooking can be a relaxing experience with a nice meal at the end of it, signing up to this culinary campaign with Michelin-starred mega-chef Jason Atherton is like being sent off to join the Foreign Legion.

Read more...

Manifest, Sky 1 review - late arrival causes cosmic upheaval

Adam Sweeting

It’s been nearly a decade since the sixth and final series of Lost, JJ Abrams’s baffling odyssey of time-travelling air crash survivors, but judging by Manifest, its influence still hovers over TV-land.

Read more...

Who Do You Think You Are? - Naomie Harris, BBC One review - shocks old and new

Veronica Lee

This episode of the celebrity genealogy show began with footage of Naomie Harris at Ian Fleming's former home in Jamaica, where she was helping launch Bond 25 (to be released next year), in which she is playing Moneypenny for the third time.

Read more...

Cindy Sherman: #untitled, BBC Four review - portrait of an enigma

Tom Baily

Cindy Sherman predicted the selfie, so goes the claim. From our current standpoint, it is all too easy to analyse her many hundreds of photographic self-portraits made since the late 1970s as cultural forebears of the digital medium.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Music Reissues Weekly: Johnnie Taylor - Who's Making Lo...

Johnnie Taylor’s big break came with the ever-fabulous September 1968 single “Who's Making Love.” His ninth 45 for the Stax label, it went Top Ten...

Faust, Royal Opera review - pure theatre in this solid reviv...

“Satan come to me!” The Devil doesn’t so much appear in David McVicar’s Faust as reveal himself to have always been there. We discover...

Mrs. Warren's Profession, Garrick Theatre review - moth...

How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893...

Mongrel review - deeply empathetic filmmaking from Taiwan

There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre...

Owen, Manchester Camerata, Takács-Nagy, Stoller Hall, Manche...

Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist...

Album: Morcheeba - Escape the Chaos

Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s...

The Phoenician Scheme review - further adventures in the idi...

It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than...

Album: Ammar 808 - Club Tounsi

Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United...

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this...

Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not...