war on terror
Tom Birchenough
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 maintain a distinction? When, and what is going too far?All these questions, and more, were in play in Sean McAllister’s outstanding A Syrian Love Story, which has already won the Grand Jury prize at the Sheffield documentary festival and looks set to reap more such honours at other events around the world. His story of a family in discord is bruising Read more ...
Barney Harsent
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 TV hour. By gifting this vehicle to the singular talent of Katie Hopkins, a person whose DNA seems to be comprised of twisted fragments from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame, TLC have found their Jeremy Clarkson. A no-nonsense star who doesn’t suffer fools. Or, it would seem, the disadvantaged, poor and vulnerable.Keeping order in the melee, as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 adversaries. Despite the inevitable plot-holes and sometimes incredible storylines, Spooks managed to keep itself anchored in the bleak realities of intelligence work, where it was wise to trust nobody and if you were paranoid, that's because the bad guys really were out to get you.As a string of leading actors such as Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shami Chakrabarti (b. 1969) is the director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, a position she famously and, some would say, fortuitously took up the day before 9/11. Raised in suburban north-west London, she became a barrister for the Home Office in the mid-Nineties. Regularly voicing her opinions on a multiplicity of current affairs programmes, notably Newsnight, she has spoken out on a huge number of issues, especially taking a stance against Britain’s “anti-terror” legislations. Such views caused her to be labelled by The Sun newspaper “the most dangerous woman in Britain” ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You haven’t had to actually watch the brutal executions staged by Islamic State (IS, or ISIS or ISIL, as it’s also known) to register them: just a single image registered has been more than enough to horrify. Managing to penetrate the world’s consciousness to such an extent has surely been one of the terror group’s most singular achievements. As one contributor to This World’s latest bulletin from the frontlines of Islamism, World’s Richest Terror Army, put it, the organization combines an ideology drawing on seventh-century principles with a 21st-century grasp of social media technology. In Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
One of the dance world's better-kept secrets is the existence of a brilliantly inventive comic double-act consisting of two paunchy, balding 50-something men. Neither humour nor the over-50s are seen all that often in dance, but it isn't tokenism which makes dance insiders turn out in delighted force for choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion: it's the knowledge that Burrows and Fargion's shows are one of the surest bets in dance for an evening that will be original, funny and clever in equal measure.I didn't get time to cast an eye on the incredibly brief programme note Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tempting to assume that Homeland [****] had died along with Damian Lewis's Brody, last seen dangling gruesomely from a crane in Tehran at the end of series three, but this tense and uncomfortable season-opener suggested that all may not be lost. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has been promoted to CIA station chief in Kabul, but she's finding that the personal price of professional success is growing exorbitantly high.At front and centre was the question of the legitimacy of killing the enemy at long distance by remote control (in Homeland's first series, it was a drone attack which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It wasn't a bad idea to change the scenery by locating the belated ninth season of 24 in London, even if they probably nicked the idea from The Bourne Ultimatum, and episode one opened with a passing shot of an East End mosque just to set the paranoia clock ticking. Nonetheless, despite scenes of grimy railway viaducts, derelict warehouses and traffic-choked streets, large stretches of this curtain-raising pair of episodes still took place inside the kind of dimly-lit operations rooms which have become the show's trademarks. The CIA's London HQ is full of tight-lipped operatives wearing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first outing of the re-tooled Captain America in 2011's The First Avenger was a bit of a hoot, thanks to its carefully-wrought 1940s setting and Stanley Tucci and Hugo Weaving portraying contrasting varieties of Teutonic craziness. Bringing the Cap into the present day after a 70-year slumber poses a few different problems, since he is quite literally a man out of time. It's really not that easy to take seriously a bloke who goes everywhere with a large tin shield clamped on his back, while everybody else has upgraded to hover-jets and laser-guided weapons.Still, while The Winter Soldier Read more ...
ellin.stein
If Errol Morris lived in Middle Earth he’d make a documentary about Sauron. If he taught at Hogwarts, he’d be turning his cameras on Voldemort. You get the idea. Morris is drawn to Dark Overlords, powerful men of steely ambition and ego, convinced of their own rightness even after events have proven that their wrong-headed ideas have demonstrably contributed to the sum of human misery.He can also claim to be the only person to have made documentaries about not one but two former U.S. Defense Secretaries (Ministers), the pinnacle of the Pentagon. The first was 2003’s Oscar-winning The Fog of Read more ...