drama
Jasper Rees
This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.The mother is Mrs Rose Coyne Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Australian drama has come on in leaps and bounds since Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, The Sullivans and Prisoner: Cell Block H. While Neighbours and Home and Away continue to play in the sand, other shows – The Secret Life of Us, The Dr Blake Mysteries and Cloud Street – display more ambition. Their reach may sometimes exceed their grasp but that’s what TV is for. Do check out the five-star metrosexual comedy drama Please Like Me on Amazon Prime. You’ll like it.Deep Water starts as it means to go on: two male swimmers writhe in the South Pacific Ocean. They are making out, not drowning. However, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, a rough tally. We’ve had a trial, a near suicide, a punch-up, death by drowning, a near bankruptcy, a tin rush, another punch-up, a baby, a probable rape, a riot, another baby, and another one on the way, possibly a product of that probable rape. And more. Poldark (★★★), in the delivery of incident upon full-blooded incident, could be accused of many things, but it will not die wondering.After another 10 episodes, we are where we are. Cap’n Ross is not off to the wars after all, but the milksop doctor Dwight is, having sailed after an off-screen night of torrid smooching with the blue- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) are American jazzers living in Paris with a residency in a smoky basement. One member of their band is a drug addict and a local Juliette Gréco type Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.Merchant seamen Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive in London on the freighter Dunbar, which docks on the Thames in the heart of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as “one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain” makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, written 20 years apart, which gain hugely from being run together. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either of them having much of a life as a single entity, since even combined they make a short evening at the theatre. But “minor” isn’t a term you’d normally reach for to describe a playwright whose name has become descriptive: Pinteresque, Beckettian, Berkoffian… Undeniably his is a style, an outlook, a poetic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic. Striking the balance between the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“FW Murnau’s work is, at first glance, the most varied, even inconsistent, of the great German cineastes.” Those are the opening words of film critic David Cairns's What Will You Be Tomorrow? an extra conceived for Early Murnau: Five Films, 1921-1925, a new three-disc Blu-ray box set of the director’s early films. After watching them, it’s clear that what might seem a contentious statement is spot on.There is no expressionist horror like 1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens nor intense romantic drama akin to Murnau’s first American film, 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Instead, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain extent." Edward Albee has died at the age of 88, having participated in his life far more actively than George and Martha, the couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? whose idea of hell is each other.His best-known plays had the civilised exterior of East Coast comfort: there were no Eddie Carbones in his world view, only profs and tennis club habitués and well-heeled products of the WASP factory. But open Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You can usually tell a show is in trouble when it executes one of its main characters. By the end, Cold Feet had run out of gas. Its instinct to laugh at life rubbed up against genuine grief, and there was nowhere for it to go but off air. But 13 years on here we are again. Historical precedent suggests it has no right to work. This Life didn’t profit when exhumed and nor in the end did Upstairs Downstairs. But if Cold Feet was your thing, it looks so far as if it still will be.What’s changed? Everything but also nothing. Adam (James Nesbitt) is now working in Singapore and after an Read more ...