Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. The opening scene was Four Weddings by way of Mamma Mia!, as the tribe of Defoe women, led by divorced Hannah (Nicola Walker) and accompanied by her ex-husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan, pictured below, with Annabel Scholey) though not his new wife, descended on Read more ...

They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).Then we had Eddie Redmayne as the titular character in Sky Atlantic’s rather ponderous revamp of The Day of the Jackal (“The Day of the Jackal feels like a month,” as one sceptic noted), Read more ...

Since its revival in 2020, All Creatures Great and Small has drawn big audiences internationally and become Channel 5’s biggest hit, even if there have been occasional grumbles about how it takes liberties with James Herriot’s original books.The show works because it gets the simple things right. It’s built on sound principles of solid plots and well-drawn characters, with the result that the ensemble at the core of All Creatures… ticks along like a piece of old-fashioned but lovingly maintained machinery.The role of grumpy but kind-hearted paterfamilias Siegfried Farnon now suits Samuel West Read more ...

Though Death in Paradise is an Anglo-French production filmed in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the Frenchness seems to have mysteriously leaked away. Where Sara Martins was a long-standing regular as DS Camille Bordey, and other French actors have rotated through the cast, the only glimmer of Gallicness remaining in this seasonal special was the vestigial presence of Elizabeth Bourgine as Catherine Bordey (Camille’s mum, pictured below with Danny John-Jules as Dwayne Myers). Otherwise we might have been on Jamaica or Barbados or St Lucia, such was the general lack of any trace of the Read more ...

It’s rare to spot Keira Knightley in a TV series, and it’s no doubt a sign of changing times that she’s starring in this six-part spies-and-guns caper, penned by Joe Barton (of Giri/Haji and The Lazarus Project fame).Set in a seasonally Christmassy London, it’s a twisty and fairly daft yarn about a dead Chinese ambassador, his missing daughter who has a heroin habit, a ruthless professional trigger man with a sentimental streak, and some murky Westminster chicanery. Then throw in the CIA and watch it all go off.Keira’s character, Helen Webb, is married to the Defence Secretary, Wallace Webb ( Read more ...

Brazilian Formula One triple-champion Ayrton Senna was already legendary during his lifetime, but his fatal crash at Imola in 1994 brought him virtual deification in his home country. The Brazilian government declared three days of national mourning, and half a million people turned out for his funeral.The Senna story was told to award-winning effect in Asif Kapadia’s documentary Senna (2010), but Netflix’s new series is the dramatised story of his life, produced by the Brazilian production company Gullane in collaboration with Senna Brands, the company created by the late driver’s family. Read more ...

You might assume that the “Has Fallen” in the title of this Anglo-French thriller connotes the presence of Scottish lunk Gerard Butler (as in Angel Has Fallen, London Has Fallen and Olympus Has Fallen), but there’s no Gerard in sight. Instead, in this TV spin-off from the movie series, we have Tewfik Jallab (pictured below) as protection officer Vincent Taleb, who’s acting as minder to France’s defence minister Philippe Bardin (Nathan Willcocks).When terrorist mayhem breaks out at a plush reception at the British Embassy in Paris, Vincent finds himself teaming up with feisty, fearless MI6 Read more ...

Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 film The Day of the Jackal was successful thanks to its lean, almost documentary-like treatment of its story of a professional assassin methodically stalking his prey, French President Charles de Gaulle. Based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel, it also gained plausibility by being rooted in historical fact. In 1962 a group of disaffected army officers planned to kill de Gaulle after he granted independence to Algeria.However, Sky Atlantic’s reincarnation, scripted by Ronan Bennett, does away with almost all of that (although it does keep the bit where the shooter calibrates Read more ...

The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...

All three seasons of Industry are now on iPlayer, and after watching the most recent one and then backtracking for another look at the other two, I am still in two minds about it. With its forensic display of a toxic world where people are viewed as “capital” and anomie is the prevailing mode, is it masterly drama or an overheated mess? The pat answer would be, it’s both. Those two options become intertwined and indistinguishable the more you watch. Stylistically, it has a winning hand in its presentation of bouts of drink and drug-fuelled sex, wounding betrayals, vicious workplace Read more ...

Delirium has greeted Disney’s eight-part adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals (part of her Rutshire Chronicles series).Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the previously-unloved Eighties, or maybe it’s because its non-stop conveyor belt of adultery, skulduggery and political incorrectness feels like some kind of liberation from the joyless paranoia of the 2020s. It also has lots of Eighties pop hits to keep it rattling along, from Tears for Fears and Blondie to ZZ Top and Depeche Mode.The rivals of the title are Rupert Campbell-Black, a former Olympic showjumper and now Minister for Sport in Read more ...

Set in Yorkshire in the 1890s, and based on the novels by CL Skelton, The Hardacres is the story of the titular family who, it seems, were pioneers of takeaway fish, although not accompanied by chips. It’s their stall selling fried herring fresh from the ocean which makes the Hardacres an unexpected fortune.Hitherto, the family have been working as dockers and fish-gutters and struggling to make ends meet, and events take a turn for the worse when patriarch Sam (Liam McMahon) damages his hand in an accident. When his wife Mary (Claire Cooper) appeals to their employer, the charmless Mr Shaw ( Read more ...