Thriller
You’ll even hate the cat: Disclaimer, on Apple TV+, reviewed
Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking…
Small-town mysteries: A Case of Matricide, by Graeme MacRae Burnet, reviewed
The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of…
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…
A haunting apparition: Bonehead, by Mo Hayder, reviewed
A young policewoman returns to her native Gloucestershire, hoping to solve a mystery connected to a terrible past accident there
Minor Linklater but fun: Hit Man reviewed
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a minor Linklater but a minor Linklater is still an event. Also, after all those…
Nowhere near as miserable as I remember it: The Beatles – Let It Be reviewed
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart.…
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed
Sinister preparations for the apocalypse by a few Silicon Valley billionaires must be thwarted in this part-thriller, part-Big Tech critique, part-meditation on doomsday
Only goodwill will get you through this reboot: Paramount+’s Frasier reviewed
Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving…
The makers of Fauda have another hit on their hands: Sky Atlantic's Munich Games reviewed
You’d have to pay me an awful lot more than I get for this column to review Monster: The Jeffrey…
Well-meaning thriller with moments of implausibility: BBC1's Crossfire reviewed
Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together…
The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
A very classy thriller indeed: C4's The Undeclared War reviewed
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location;…
Dangerous liaisons: Bad Eminence, by James Greer, reviewed
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…
Shades of Tony Soprano: BBC1's The Responder reviewed
Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch…
Colson Whitehead celebrates old Harlem in a hardboiled thriller that’s also a morality tale
For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place…
The best Cold War thriller I've seen that I fully understand: The Courier reviewed
The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my…
Much smarter than your average podcast: Passenger List reviewed
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
Quietly radiates a wholly justified confidence: BBC 1’s The Pact reviewed
There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against…
On the track of a mysterious recluse: Maxwell’s Demon, by Steven Hall, reviewed
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
Superb but depraved: BBC1’s The Serpent reviewed
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed
Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish…
Why does anyone still rate Vertigo and its creepy, wonky plot?
Here’s something that may interest you. Or not. (Could go either way.) I was looking over Sight & Sound’s ‘100…
Classic tangled thriller: Sky's Gangs of London reviewed
There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however,…
Sharp family saga with a thriller uneasily attached: ITV’s Flesh and Blood reviewed
As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in…
