Television
Ugly, mechanical, soulless: Apple TV+’s Hijack reviewed
Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he…
Time to take your meds, Kanye
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
Netflix has struck gold: Tour de France: Unchained reviewed
I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow…
One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
Gratuitously twisty, turny nonsense: Sky Max’s Poker Face reviewed
Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…
Wonderfully naturalistic and intriguingly odd: BBC2’s The Gallows Pole reviewed
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
Spooky, classy dystopian sci-fi: Apple TV+’s Silo reviewed
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Watching Queen Cleopatra felt like witnessing the death of scholarship
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Despite the lack of sex, stick with it: Paramount Plus’s Fatal Attraction reviewed
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…
Purest fantasy but you’ll love it: Tetris reviewed
Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…
Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
One of the best things you’ll see on TV this year: Netflix’s War Sailor reviewed
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one…
Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
Succession works because the writers don’t care about the boring business storylines
I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly…
Makes a change to see such reassuringly competent policemen: ITV1’s Grace reviewed
Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you…
What a gloriously easy living Chris Rock makes from his comedy
Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or…
Watch some liars claim that youth and beauty don’t go together
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way…
In defence of the fabrications of reality TV
My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of…
Riveting and titillating: BBC2’s Parole reviewed
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
What I love about Netflix’s Kleo is that it’s so damned German
I was almost tempted not to watch Kleo because it sounded like so many things I’d seen before: beautiful ex-Stasi…
Joking aside
Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can…
Classy but constrained by its video game origins: Sky’s The Last of Us reviewed
The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a…
A ‘look at these funny people’ doc that could have been presented by any TV hack: Grayson Perry’s Full English reviewed
For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as…
Heist drama with a novelty spin that isn’t very novel: Netflix’s Kaleidoscope reviewed
Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end,…
Guiltily compelling: Spector, on Sky Documentaries, reviewed
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told…
