TV
Adam Sweeting
The first series of James Graham’s Sherwood, shown in June 2022, introduced us to the Nottinghamshire town of Ashfield, a former mining community devastated by pit closures and the miserable aftermath of the 1984 miners’ strike. The town was torn by personal and political feuds, and the murder of former miner Gary Jackson was like throwing gasoline on long-smouldering embers.As this second series opens, we find a few things have changed. DCS Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has now stepped aside from the police to head the new Violence Intervention Team, which aims to provide support networks Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems cricketer-turned-TV star Freddie Flintoff was lucky to survive his crash in a Morgan three-wheeled roadster in December 2022, and his recuperation has been painful and traumatic. As he explained in the opening episode of his second Field of Dreams series, the accident, which occurred during filming for Top Gear, is going to have long-term consequences. “I struggle with anxiety. I have nightmares, I have flashbacks. It’s been so hard to cope with.”He also had to undergo a series of operations, and didn’t appear in public for many months. But he was determined to continue with his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This heist-orientated black comedy could appeal to fans of the likes of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven or the same director’s Out of Sight, without ever quite matching their zip and sparkle. But there are enough loud bangs and big bucks to provide an entertaining night in (presupposing there are suitable lubricants to hand), though you wouldn’t think so from some of the ferociously negative reviews it’s been receiving.In the director’s chair is Doug Bourne Identity Liman, with a script from Chuck Maclean and Casey Affleck. The latter co-stars with Matt Damon, revisiting their home ground Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The music scene on the New Jersey shore in the late Sixties and early Seventies must have been a thing of wonder, a kind of Merseymania-on-Sea. Its mix of soul, R&B and primitive rock’n’roll fuelled countless groups, not least Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and eventually Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Stevie Van Zandt was a key member of both of those outfits.While history has decreed that Springsteen’s vast shadow should eclipse everything, Bill Teck’s documentary (originally made for HBO) does a solid job of reminding us that maybe the Boss did need a little help, and he got Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“Family-friendly fun” seems to have mutated over the years into elaborate films featuring high-octane animation, starry voicing and often mushy sentiments. In older children’s TV, gone are the days of actual humanoids mucking about with stun guns. Only Doctor Who has continued to deliver the teatime goods. So the arrival of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s Time Bandits on Apple TV+ is to be relished. It’s rated PG, I’m not sure why, unless its scary bits are considered just a tad too scary. Having your uncaring parents incinerated into lumps of carbon would strike me as an event Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jenna Coleman seems to pick her roles with care, whether it’s Queen Victoria, the girlfriend of mass murderer Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent, or “occult detective” Johanna Constantine in The Sandman, but her antennae may have been a bit awry when she climbed aboard this one.The Jetty is long on atmosphere and scenery but short on plausibility, and hammers away at its themes of abused women and abusive men so relentlessly that there’s not much room for anything else.The plot is kick-started by an arson attack at a lakeside boathouse, but screenwriter Cat Jones’s plan was to use this to ignite Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a former schoolteacher now scraping a nocturnal living as a cab driver in Liverpool (you’d never guess the show was filmed in Dublin). A haunted and lonely character, broken by his failed marriage, he becomes fixated with the small-hours radio talk show hosted by Lawrence Brightway (Sean Pertwee, pictured below), whose relaxed, sandpapery voice makes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Celine Dion first experienced the muscle spasming which would eventually be diagnosed as Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS). She suddenly found she couldn’t control the pitch of her voice, a calamitous occurrence for a singer renowned for the almost superhuman power and accuracy of her vocal control. The condition advanced surreptitiously over the succeeding years, and when Dion had to pull out of her residency in Las Vegas in 2021 it became clear that the problem was acute.The Cleveland Clinic website informs us that SPS is “a rare autoimmune neurological disorder that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucie Shorthouse is enjoying some high-profile TV action with her roles in Channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts, about the adventures of an all-woman Muslim punk band, and in BBC One’s reincarnated Rebus. In the former, she plays the band’s niqab-clad manager Momtaz, while the latter casts her as rookie cop DC Siobhan Clarke, trying to cope with the maverick behaviour of the titular John Rebus, played by Richard Rankin. Both shows have enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and have pulled healthy audiences, which must surely have got the phones ringing in the office of Shorthouse’s agent. And that’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...