war on terror
The Deminer review - life on the edge in IraqTuesday, 24 April 2018
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him,... Read more... |
Below the Surface, Series Finale, BBC Four review - tense and twisty to the bitter endSunday, 08 April 2018
In the previous couple of episodes, some light began to seep into the subterranean gloom of the Copenhagen kidnappers, or at any rate onto their identities and motivations. The military theme with which Below the Surface opened, with Philip Norgaard... Read more... |
Lisa Halliday: Asymmetry review - unconventional and brilliantSunday, 04 March 2018
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a... Read more... |
Ugly Lies the Bone, National TheatreFriday, 03 March 2017
Theatre increasingly uses digital delights to enhance audience enjoyment. And you can easily see why. Visual effects that mimic the experience of plunging into virtual reality inject a much-needed wow factor into otherwise quite mundane stories. And... Read more... |
Homeland, Series 6, Channel 4Monday, 23 January 2017
The big surprise of this new-season opener of Homeland was that black ops specialist Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) didn't die at the end of series 5 after all, despite the fact that we last saw him apparently moribund in his hospital bed, having... Read more... |
SnowdenMonday, 05 December 2016
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on paranoia-infused thrillers like The Parallax View or All the President's Men, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American conspiracies. However, in contrast to his earlier labyrinthine epics Nixon and JFK,... Read more... |
Conspiracy Files: The Trump Dossier, BBC TwoFriday, 04 November 2016
So we’re less than a week away from America’s choice. Many in the States have presented it as a kind of Sophie’s Choice – an unbearable outcome no matter who they choose. On the one hand they have a racist, sexist, braggart bully who has been named... Read more... |
London Has FallenWednesday, 02 March 2016
The get-the-President movie, a genre we might term "POTUS in Peril", has had a chequered history, from The President's Plane Is Missing, Air Force One and Escape from New York to White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen. Now here's London Has Fallen... Read more... |
Homeland, Series 5, Channel 4Monday, 12 October 2015
Stunningly reinvented in series four, Homeland sustained the momentum with this tense and menacing fifth season opener. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has now quit the CIA for a new job in Berlin, where she's working as head of security for... Read more... |
Storyville: A Syrian Love Story, BBC FourTuesday, 29 September 2015
Managing the boundaries of closeness in documentary filmmaking can be a complicated issue. Does the documentarist figure only as a fly-on-the-wall observer – or become involved, caught up in the story of his or her subject? Is it possible to... Read more... |
If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World, TLCFriday, 07 August 2015
The premise is a simple one. Get some fairly well-known celebs – preferably at least one comedian – stick them in a room, get them to say some contentious things in front of a studio audience for some un-PC LOLs and then edit it down to a hilarious... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Spooks, the movieWednesday, 06 May 2015
During its 10-season run on BBC One between May 2002 and October 2011, Spooks built a lasting reputation as a superior espionage thriller, charting the battle of a squad of MI5 agents to protect the realm against its fiendish and unscrupulous... Read more... |
