sat 07/12/2024

Olivia Colman

Mothering Sunday review - Odessa Young shines in adaptation of Graham Swift's novella

30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the...

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Oscars 2019: Olivia Colman crowned queen of Hollywood

The 91st Academy Awards began with a rousing concert appearance from Queen to kick off a show from which Bohemian Rhapsody led the field with four trophies. Three host-free hours later, the ceremony got a surprise shot of adrenaline from the...

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The Favourite review - scintillatingly warped portrait of the court of Queen Anne

It can be fascinating to see ourselves as others see us. In this case, Athens-born director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster) brings his acute eye to the English country-house period drama in a scintillatingly warped...

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Murder on the Orient Express review - lushly upholstered, lightly remodelled ride

Kenneth Branagh, like his Poirot, cares about cutlery. The director and detective’s fastidiousness both find their ideal home on the Orient Express, where waiters measure fork placement with the precision of Poirot’s sacred monster of a moustache....

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Broadchurch review - the final reckoning

“Take your pick. Who shall we talk to first?” DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and DS Miller (Olivia Colman) had their three prime suspects waiting for them in custody. The fact that none of them proved to be the guilty party was what was wrong not...

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Broadchurch, Series 3, ITV

The first series of Broadchurch was a gigantic hit four years ago, though 2015’s follow-up suffered a bit of a slow puncture. Can this third and supposedly final outing restore the show to its former glories?Episode one made a tidy and reasonably...

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Fleabag, BBC Three

Have you seen Fleabag yet? If not, here’s the one-word review: brilliant. You need three hours to watch the lot on the iPlayer, which is BBC Three’s main address these days. Do come back afterwards and read this longer appreciation, which contains...

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The Night Manager, Series Finale, BBC One

So at a stroke, The Night Manager has proved that appointment-to-view television is not yet dead in the age of Netflix, and that the BBC can do itself a favour in battling against the best American dramas if it can find a US production partner (AMC...

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The Night Manager, BBC One

John le Carré's 1993 novel The Night Manager was his first post-Cold War effort, and the fortuitous setting of its early scenes in a hotel in Cairo has allowed TV dramatiser David Farr to move the action forward from the post-Thatcher fallout to the...

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The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos is the director who reinvigorated Greek cinema with his dark, absurdist films Dogtooth and Alps. His English-language debut is even more off the charts, yet also the most familiar; after all, it is essentially a love story. The...

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DVD: London Road

It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a...

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London Road

So many plays and musicals are adapted from films (Bend it Like Beckham is up next) that it comes as something of a throwback to find a film that takes as its source an acclaimed musical play. The sheer fact that there is a movie of London Road is...

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