Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Historic unsolved murders have become their own mini-genre, with the likes of Cold Case lurking in the small print of the schedules and Silent Witness still going strong in its 20th series. A hit the first time out in 2015, Unforgotten is back with a new investigation of another mystery cadaver.This time, the deceased was dredged out of the River Lea in north-east London, having been crammed into a suitcase (post-mortem, one hopes). Detectives Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) were promptly down on the riverbank, poking at the mysterious plasticky skin of the Read more ...
David Kettle
A computer virus – even one as apparently malevolent and unstoppable as the infamous Stuxnet – would make an unlikely subject for a feature-length documentary, you might think. But New York documentary maker Alex Gibney’s Zero Days is a remarkable achievement – and in so many ways. As an edge-of-your-seat, real-world thriller; as a sobering investigation of shadowy US foreign policy; and ultimately as a wake-up call to a new form of warfare, unleashed without us even noticing. It has its faults, for sure, but Zero Days is an undeniably important film – compelling, expertly structured, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scott Gibson won best newcomer at last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Life After Death, about the near-fatal brain haemorrhage he had as a 24-year-old in 2009. It happened after the Glaswegian had been to Blackpool for a stag weekend with 11 mates, including the groom “Junkie Steve”. Some rich material for an hour of comedy in there...He begins by telling us how happy he is to be in London as it's 400 miles from his partner. Oh dear – I thought that kind of joke was the territory of Roy “Chubby” Brown. The story itself starts with that stag weekend and a 72-year-old “Mr Magoo” minibus Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're back at Friday Street, the crumbling cop shop on the wrong side of Manchester, where DI Viv Deering marshals her squad of anarchic misfits to fight crime. Paul Abbott's rude but not crude police comedy drama was a great hit first time round and managed to be riotously unPC while unravelling a complicated serial murder case. And, as with the late, great Cagney and Lacey, some of the best scenes were in the ladies' loo; two of Deering's closest aides are women (played by Elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach).At the end of the first series we learned that Deering's husband was the killer and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Painted in 1891 by Tom Roberts, A Break Away! shows us a flock of maddened, thirsty sheep careering down a hillside stripped of grass by drought, accompanied by rollicking sheepdogs and cowboy shepherds on horses. If those sheep pile on top of one another into the puny stream at the bottom of the hill, injury – even death – will occur. The perspective is vertiginous, and the scene almost visibly pulsates with energy. It is one of Australia’s best-loved paintings (main picture), emblematic of the growing prideful nationalism of a new country – well, new to Europeans who ignored, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sherlock’s back in the here and now, and not before time. Twelve months ago, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes laid down his mobile phone to return to Edwardian London for a plate-spinning deer-stalking mind-warping one-off. The Abominable Bride, though good in parts, caused a mass outbreak of head-scratching. Had Team Gatiss/Moffat fallen a little too in love with metatextual rebooting and gone and got lost in their own hall of mirrors?It now looks as if they thought so too. The fourth series began with a story that, by Sherlockian standards, played a unusually straight bat. It began at the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) and The Wasted Vigil (2008) were partially set in Afghanistan, The Golden Legend is set in the fictional city of Zamana, somewhere on the Grand Trunk Road in northern Pakistan. Though vibrantly, bloodily contemporary, Aslam’s Zamana is also a heady, symbolic place, rich with cultural memory of a more loving and tolerant time. Two families are at the centre of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
New Year’s Eve has its rituals and, in the Russian-speaking world, watching the 1976 film The Irony of Fate is core to ringing out the old and ringing in the new. A television staple, it has the seasonal status of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Little Shop on the Corner and White Christmas. First seen in Russian homes as a three-hour, two-part small-screen production on the first day of 1976, it was subsequently edited and shown in cinemas.The Irony of Fate (the full title is The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!: Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром!) is a farcical and straightforward-seeming Read more ...
theartsdesk
Prepare to disagree. 2016 has been getting bad reviews all year long, but for film it was actually pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that there are big omissions from this list of our best films from the past 12 months. Our method of selection was arbitrary: each of the theartsdesk’s film reviewers was invited to volunteer one film each as their favourite of the year. No one was allowed to choose two.So there is no place in our top seven for the film which was this year’s winner of the Oscar for best film (Spotlight), nor best adapted screenplay (The Big Short), nor the film with the best Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…The Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
The hyperbole began as soon as the voiceover did: “For most of us Judi Dench is M…” So much for Bernard Lee. The implication was that if you can remember him, then Judi Dench: All the World’s Her Stage was not for you. After all, she played James Bond’s boss for 17 years – until, at Daniel Craig’s suggestion, the sky fell in on her in Skyfall.Older fans of 007 – ie those watching BBC Two on a Friday evening – will have heard it all before (on Wogan, Film 97 and Desert Island Discs). Despite promising to uncover her secrets, there were no revelations in Francis Whately’s tribute to the much- Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy Valley, she has settled on perhaps the quintessential troubled Yorkshire family, with awesome bleakness on the side: the Brontës.Despite a difference of 150 years in setting, To Walk Invisible is not only a seamless progression from Wainwright’s previous work, but the story comes, ready-made, both achingly sad and also driven by a passion that can’t Read more ...