drama
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the current political climate, it would have been grotesquely inappropriate to conclude even the most fictionalised account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with any kind of neat resolution. But even if Hugo Blick’s absorbing thriller had ever dealt in such things, the carefully orchestrated dual-location bloodbath at the climax of its penultimate episode was all the hint one needed that a happy ending was never on the cards.Moral ambiguity makes for more interesting drama, of course, but by its ending The Honourable Woman had turned traditional notions of “good” and “bad” on their head Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Imagine that you were a TV executive producer, and that you had managed to cast one of the country’s finest actors in the lead role. To what use would you put his considerable talent and gravitas? If your answer was not “engage him in a five-minute shouty monologue about how much he hates his eyebrows”, well, congratulations: you are not Doctor Who show runner Steven Moffat. But commiserations too, because you missed out on the funniest and best-played regeneration scenes since the show’s renaissance in 2005.It may have been billed as a feature-length episode, simulcast in cinemas across the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Village got its commemoration in early. While the First World War has been on every broadcaster’s to-do list 100 years on, Peter Moffat’s portrait of rural life covered 1914-18 in 2013. The first series was not, it may be safely contended, a lot of fun. So all-encompassing was the miserablism that after six hours you weren’t sure whether to swallow a bottle of anti-depressants or throw a brick at a mansion.The good news is the war is over and things may just be looking up. In one giant stride The Village has caught up with Downton Abbey and entered the roaring Twenties. You know the sort Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As we approach the anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the television schedules devoted to it are becoming denser and denser. In volume, at least, rather more than insight. We wonder just what more can be broadcast, after all, about the history concerned that has not already been said at some point in the century that has followed the conflict's tragic onset?Jan Peter’s ambitious Great War Diaries answers two questions that remain relevant, namely, just how did it really feel, and then, what was it like for those on the other side(s)? One of the more impressive programmes we have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finding a new angle for a forbidden romance film must be tough. Telling the story of a couple where one is married, in a relationship or in some other situation impeding the path of true love or lust is not enough. New settings are needed. In the French drama Grand Central, the problem is solved when love blossoms inside a nuclear power station and the surrounding encampment.Grand Central tells of Gary (Tahar Rahim) and Karole (Léa Seydoux). From near Lyon, he has pitched up in the Rhone Valley and finds a job as a decontamination worker at a nuclear power plant. Karole works there and is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
A few months ago, Glasgow Girls - Cora Bissett and David Greig’s 2013 musical based on the true story of seven teenage girls from Drumchapel, Glasgow and their campaign to end the forced removal of school-age asylum seekers - returned to the city’s Citizens Theatre for another sell-out run. It makes the timing of this all-new reinterpretation of a story that has already been the subject of two TV documentaries a little strange, particularly as it too was billed as a “musical drama”: surely a more effective approach, I thought, would have been to adapt the existing critically acclaimed show, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It's a woman’s world at Park Theatre, where an all-female company tackles three American shorts that place the private feminine experience under a microscope. Jack Thorpe Baker’s casting yields mixed results, emphasising the shrewd analysis of gendered thought in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Philip Dawkins’s Cast of Characters (both half an hour), though Brooke Allen’s 50-minute study of grief, The Deer, already suffers from character opacity. The Deer is markedly less incisive, providing the evening with a somewhat muted conclusion.Cast of Characters offers dizzying formal experimentation, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Common, Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC One drama about the effects of the joint enterprise law, seems at first sight to lack the topical horsepower of projects like Hillsborough. McGovern doesn’t disappoint, however, crafting from the apparent obscurity of an eighteenth-century statute intended to discourage aristocratic duels by implicating both parties a riveting, corkscrew-plotted narrative that brings to overdue public notice an easily abused and abusive regulation that today targets the opposite end of society.The didactic drive can, in lesser hands, flatten subtlety and exaggerate the obvious Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The BBC might have convinced itself that the only thing that will change in the way it caters to the youth market next autumn is the method of delivery, but Murdered By My Boyfriend makes the case for retaining BBC Three as a channel that can be idly flipped onto on a Monday night. Previews of the short drama, inspired by real-life events, were full of the usual cliches: the story that writer Regina Moriarty told was both “tragic” and “depressingly familiar”. But the fact remains that young women between the ages of 16 and 24 are statistically most at risk of being abused by a partner; and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Twelve minutes into the Icelandic film Of Horses and Men something occurs on screen which was obviously going to happen, but actually seeing it happen is astonishing. It’s something which would normally either occur off screen or be alluded to. Of Horses and Men has many such uncomfortable moments. It’s also funny, heart-warming and poignant – a one-off.Of Horses and Men is set and filmed in rural Iceland. About the residents of a valley, their loves and their symbiotic relationship with their equine companions, it draws parallels between the behaviour of horse and human. What the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first line of his Wikipedia entry says that Tom Hardy "is an English actor" (he was born in Hammersmith), but for the 84 minute duration of Locke I was fully prepared to accept that he came from Llangollen or Llareggub. The film's narrative floats on Hardy's warming Welsh brogue like a boat navigating heaving tides and contrary currents, as his character Ivan Locke tries to cope with his life disintegrating around his ears.It's not easy to devise an entirely fresh form of film-making, but writer/director Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Dirty Pretty Things) has had a pretty good go here. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once in his stride as a director, Samuel Fuller never shied away from the controversial. The mental-hospital set Shock Corridor, from 1963, prefigured One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and touched on the arms race, incest, racism and the Korean War. A year later, his Naked Kiss sympathetically portrayed a prostitute. The final film he made in America, 1982’s White Dog, also pulled no punches and met the nature of racism head on. In some quarters of the press it was trailed as itself being racist. It was not released in America. Fuller then upped and offed to France where he had long been hailed Read more ...