Television
Arresting visual spectacle and superb fight scenes: Netflix’s One Piece reviewed
What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close.…
A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was
Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…
Why I’m addicted to Australian MasterChef
Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third…
Subtle, psychologically twisty drama: BBC3’s Bad Behaviour reviewed
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
Enthralling: BBC4’s Colosseum reviewed
In the year 2023, the Neo-Roman Empire was at the height of its powers. A potentially restive populace was kept…
Bags of charm and a gripping plot: Netflix’s The Chosen One reviewed
Some years ago, Mark Millar (the creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman, etc.) hit on yet another brilliant conceit for one of…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed
It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…
University Challenge deserves Amol Rajan
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
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…
