TV drama
Agatha Christie's Crooked House, Channel 5 review - actresses chew furniture for funMonday, 18 December 2017
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent... Read more... |
Witnesses: A Frozen Death finale, BBC Four review - weirdo childbirth cult hits the buffersSunday, 17 December 2017
It’s remarkable how pervasive the Scandi-noir formula has become, with its penchant for weird and perverted killers, labyrinthine plotting and intriguingly flawed protagonists. The French-made Witnesses: A Frozen Death was another fragment chipped... Read more... |
The Tunnel: Vengeance, Sky Atlantic review - entente not-so-cordialeFriday, 15 December 2017
For the third and allegedly final time, we hasten back to the Kent coast for another outbreak of cross-Channel crime. Not all that surprisingly, this new series of the Franglais cop show focuses on a people-smuggling racket bringing bedraggled... Read more... |
Bancroft, ITV review - Sarah Parish's very cold caseThursday, 14 December 2017
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a... Read more... |
The Crown, Series 2, Netflix review - all our yesterdays, cunningly rewrittenFriday, 08 December 2017
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series.... Read more... |
Howards End finale, BBC One review - who isn't going to miss the Schlegel sisters?Monday, 04 December 2017
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant... Read more... |
Witnesses: A Frozen Death, BBC Four review - plummeting temperatures in the Pas de CalaisSunday, 26 November 2017
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of... Read more... |
Godless, Netflix review – a proper wild west rideThursday, 23 November 2017
There’s a storm heading to La Belle, the small forgotten town in the heart of the American West. As black clouds flash above the prairie, the injured body of Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) falls at the door of widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle... Read more... |
I Know Who You Are, series 2 finale, BBC Four review - Spanish drama literally took no prisonersSunday, 19 November 2017
So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals... Read more... |
Love, Lies & Records, BBC One review - Ashley Jensen too good to be trueFriday, 17 November 2017
Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development. This is the new drama from Kay Mellor, who set Band of... Read more... |
Peaky Blinders, series 4, BBC Two review - new threats, same thrillsThursday, 16 November 2017
BBC Two’s flagship crime drama Peaky Blinders returns for another guilty dose of slo-mo walking, flying sparks and anachronistic soundtracks. In the opening episode “The Noose”, we’re served a familiar course of family disputes, sinister threats and... Read more... |
Howards End, BBC One review - EM Forster adaptation is finding its footingMonday, 13 November 2017
Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released? So it is, astonishingly, which surely means the time is ripe for a fresh celluloid take on EM Forster's enduring 1910 novel... Read more... |
