sun 05/10/2025

tv

The Night Caller, Channel 5 review - all he hears is radio ga ga

Adam Sweeting

Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.

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Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+ review - you read the book and saw the movie...

Adam Sweeting

Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.

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Eric, Netflix review - a fairytale of New York

Adam Sweeting

New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head.

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Tokyo Vice, Series 2, BBC iPlayer review - an exciting ride that stretches credibility

Adam Sweeting

It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar.

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The Beach Boys, Disney+ review - heroes and villains and good vibrations

Adam Sweeting

It was – let’s see – 63 years ago today that Brian Wilson taught the band to play. Fabled for their resplendent harmonies and ecstatic hymning of the sun-kissed California dream, the Beach Boys seemed to represent everything golden and glorious about the mythic American West Coast. If you lived in Detroit or Deptford, it looked like a wonderland indeed.

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Rebus, BBC One review - revival of Ian Rankin's Scottish 'tec hits the jackpot

Adam Sweeting

The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has reworked the character as a younger Detective Sergeant, drawing on the spirit of Rankin’s original novels but with the author’s blessing to take the character somewhere new.

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Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, Disney+ review - how the boy from Sayreville, NJ conquered the world

Adam Sweeting

To mark the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s second-greatest gift to rock’n’roll, Disney+ have served up this sprawling four-part documentary which tells you more about Jon Bon Jovi and his band of brothers than you ever needed to know. Or, possibly, wanted to.

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Red Eye, ITV review - Anglo-Chinese relations tested in junk-food thriller

Adam Sweeting

Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air travel. This time, North China Air’s Flight 357, from London to Beijing, hasn’t been hijacked, but it has become the scene of a string of inexplicable murders, carried out by unknown assassin(s) as it cruises at 40,000 feet.

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Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop show despite a slacker structure

Helen Hawkins

The first season of Blue Nights was so close to police procedural perfection, it would be hard for season two to reach the same heights. Overall, it doesn’t, though there are still special moments.

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Baby Reindeer, Netflix review - a misery memoir disturbingly presented

Helen Hawkins

Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. 

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