Olivia Colman
Adam Sweeting
You can see why writers and TV companies like the idea of creating sequels to successful series, but trying to make lightning strike twice has obvious drawbacks. In the case of the original Broadchurch, the runaway ratings blockbuster which ended in April 2013, the story felt so complete and self-contained that the notion of a sequel seemed redundant, or gratuitous.But anyway here's series two, arriving in a kind of tumult of secrecy as ITV stoutly withheld any previews or much information of any kind from clamouring newshounds. Such is the allure of the Broadchurch brand that this opener 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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps the BBC didn't need to make W1A, its new self-satirising sitcom. In the clerical comedy Rev, the Church of England could be considered a very serviceable metaphor for the Corporation, with its unfathomable layers of bureaucracy, well-meaning but slightly pitiable niceness, a self-image that belongs to a forgotten century, and self-flagellation before other cultures. Though the BBC does have rather more money to spend.In this series three opener, the Rev Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) became a new father, after his wife Alex (Olivia Colman) had very nearly given birth in the back of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
The British romcom is in crisis. Once a pretty reliable source of charm and laughs, these films channelled the spirit of the UK's reliably brilliant sitcoms through the silver screen. Our romantic comedies can be great because we hold no truck with cheesy romance; moments that could be mawkish are undercut by self-deprecation, calamity and even politics. See Hugh Grant's bumbling speech in Four Weddings, the polemical Brassed Off, or Shaun of the Dead which gave us romance with added zombies.However, recent efforts The Decoy Bride, Not Another Happy Ending, I Give It a Year and About Time Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There are times us northerners watch your typical London-set big-budget BBC drama and think, well, this really is another world. Whether it’s the two-hour commutes or the estate agencies where there is so much business that nobody has time to sit and watch cat videos on YouTube, there’s little about the world of The 7.39 familiar to those of us lacking three-bedroom semi-detached suburbia and a job in the City.That said, there’s probably little about David Nicholls’ vision of London that seems familiar to those who live and work in the capital either. As in the screenwriter’s novel-turned- Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator has become such a trope of contemporary noir that the fate of the first great modern detective, following the events of his first televised outing, is not particularly surprising. The Murder in Angel Lane has Paddy Considine reprise his 2011 role as the titular detective, but this time the mystery he is charged with solving has sprung entirely from the pen of Appropriate Adult’s Neil McKay rather than being inspired by true-life events.Forced out of the police on mental health grounds by the events of his last televised adventure, former Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an American series would stretch to 16 or 22 episodes. Hats off, then, to ITV and Broadchurch writer Chris Chibnall for picking up the baton to create an eight-parter designed to depict the impact of a boy's murder on a small, tightly-knit seaside town (Oskar McNamara as murder victim Danny Latimer, pictured below). Hats partly back on again, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Although I Give It a Year seems to have more than a whiff of a Richard Curtis rom-com about it, don’t be fooled as this is the debut of British writer-director Dan Mazer, the co-writer of the emphatically more outré Brüno and Borat, along with various incarnations of Ali G. Furthermore he’s lobbed Scary Movie's Anna Faris and Bridemaids' Rose Byrne into the mix. The message is thus: while it's certainly not averse to plundering the fridge for cheese, for the most part I Give It a Year puts the emphasis on broad, bawdy comedy.Hastening through the schmaltz, the film begins with a courtship Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another presidential movie. Another year, another lead role for a stuttering English monarch. Hyde Park on Hudson feels like the product of one of those irony-free meetings in Burbank. You know, the ones in which executives crank up a cinematic concept on the basis that if the audience liked X, they’ll suck up Y. And hey, why not hit them with some Z too? Thus a few days on from Lincoln and with memories of The King’s Speech still warm, we have a film in which an iconic leader of the free world, in this case Franklin D Roosevelt, receives a visit from stiff, diffident George VI Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Winsome” isn’t a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noël Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinner word-charades of his hit Hay Fever. Yet now (as then) it’s a word that speaks to precisely the brand of giddy, self-conscious charm Coward’s play so determinedly exerts. Howard Davies’s new production splashes gaily about in the work’s theatrical shallows, giggling, posing and romping with the skill of a Monte Carlo ingenue. The result is a show that’s seriously good without ever feeling the need to get Read more ...
graham.rickson
I started keeping a swear word tally at the start of Paddy Considine’s Leeds-set Tyrannosaur and abandoned my efforts several minutes in when it looked as if I was about to fill an entire page. As the film begins, Peter Mullan’s character Joseph does something truly unspeakable to a dog. He then racially abuses the post office clerk where he’s cashing his giro and smashes the shop window. This is a character sorely in need of redemption, and it is to the film’s credit that Joseph’s upward trajectory turns out to be so gripping to watch.His life unexpectedly intersects with that of Hannah (an Read more ...
theartsdesk
Predictably and no doubt justly, it was a good night for The Artist at tonight’s London Critics’ Circle Film Awards. It won Film of the Year, Director of the Year for Michel Hazanavicius and Actor of the Year for its dashing lead Jean Dujardin. Both were at BFI Southbank this evening to pick up their gongs. Fans of Iranian cinema will be cheered to see A Separation also pick three awards, Foreign Language Film of the Year, Screenwriter of the Year for Asghar Farhadi and Supporting Actress of the Year for Sareh Bayat.Of the surprises, the biggest was that Meryl Streep did not walk away Read more ...