tv
Sharp Objects, Sky Atlantic review - Amy Adams battles her demonsTuesday, 10 July 2018
Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations. Read more... |
Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, BBC Two review - blues, booze and duesSunday, 01 July 2018
There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has to say. Nor is it obvious why it has been made now. Read more... |
Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know / A Night In, BBC Four, review - chaps on filmSaturday, 30 June 2018
Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live. Read more... |
Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray LadyMonday, 25 June 2018
The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming? Read more... |
Natural World: The Super Squirrels, BBC Two review - silliness and factsWednesday, 20 June 2018
Squirrels are a breed as diverse as they are ubiquitous: they inhabit environments as extreme as desert and tundra, and all the lush greenery, rainforest and urban jungle imaginable between. So bless the producers of The Super Squirrels who humorously avoid a straight-down-the-line profile of the nearly 300 species around the world and instead showcase their not inconsiderable abilities through a series of gleeful reality TV piss-takes. Read more... |
Julius Caesar, BBC Four review - electrifying TV launch of all-women Shakespeare trilogyMonday, 18 June 2018
Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years? Read more... |
Panorama: Putin's Russia with David Dimbleby, BBC One review - jolly football weatherThursday, 14 June 2018
There was a lovely moment at the beginning of this Panorama where David Dimbleby was chatting to a schoolgirl – not just any schoolgirl actually, because she came from a family of 10 children, which surely makes her a bit out of the ordinary, even in... Read more... |
Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets TarantinoThursday, 14 June 2018
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Read more... |
Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in SnowdoniaSunday, 10 June 2018
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness. Read more... |
Our Girl, Series 4, BBC One review - 2 Section versus Boko HaramWednesday, 06 June 2018
I’ve never been in the Army, but I can’t imagine anybody involved with the making of Our Girl (BBC One) has either. Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
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