Netflix
Cinema as car ad
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
Across the board
How chess got cool
What lies beneath
Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Postcode lottery!’ people scream when one area feels less well treated than another in a public service — in this…
Think twice
The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani…
Superb but depraved
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
The rise and fall of Netflix
In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, then CEO of Time Warner, was asked if he thought Netflix had any chance of taking…
Pure genius
Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse…
Sets appeal
The distracting beauty of TV backdrops
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Marriage of inconvenience
‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…
Nous sommes tous Emily in Paris – why can’t we admit it?
A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil…
Zinger ping pong
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 — don’t worry, you haven’t missed six earlier films — is a…
What cinema is for
Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…
Bonjour happiness
Soon, very soon now — even sooner than I imagined, if A Suitable Boy turns out to be as lacklustre…
Audio onanism
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
Black lives didn’t matter
Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is about four African-American vets who return to Vietnam to locate the body of their…
Speak of the devil
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix…
Lessons in terror
Sweden is now properly celebrated as the Land that Called Coronavirus Correctly. But in the distant past, those with long…
Beasties and besties
The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on…
The great escape
When I lived briefly in Stamford Hill I was mesmerised by the huge fur hats (shtreimel) worn by the local…
The fascinating Ms Swift
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
Race relations
Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies…
Spooky delights
One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to…
