Television
Downhill fast
I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow…
Split decision
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
Let’s twist again
Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…
This was England
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
Inside story
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Death on the Nile
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Rabbit redux
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…
Vaudeville villainy
Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…
Sex offenders
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
Scandi crush
War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one…
Losing the plot
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
If I were a rich man
I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly…
On the sick list
Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you…
A Rock and a hard place
Chris Rock was paid $20 million for his 70-minute Netflix special, so by my reckoning his riff on whether or…
Same old story
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way…
Sporting greats
My new favourite tennis player, just ahead of Novak Djokovic, is Nick Kyrgios. Up until recently I’d barely heard of…
Calling time
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
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…
Still in the game
The Last of Us is widely being hailed as the best video game adaptation ever. Maybe. But it’s still a…
Procession of eccentrics
For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as…
Made to order
Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end,…
The strangest figure in pop
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told…
Turkish delight
A strange new virus has infected half the world but the cure is worse than the disease: authoritarian tyranny, in…
Sentimental value
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
