Thriller

The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed

25 November 2023 9:00 am

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

21 October 2023 9:00 am

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

1 October 2022 9:00 am

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

24 September 2022 9:00 am

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

13 August 2022 9:00 am

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

2 July 2022 9:00 am

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

2 July 2022 9:00 am

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

29 January 2022 9:00 am

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

16 October 2021 9:00 am

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

14 August 2021 9:00 am

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

10 July 2021 9:00 am

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

22 May 2021 9:00 am

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

13 February 2021 9:00 am

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

9 January 2021 9:00 am

The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…

An extraordinary debut: Make Up reviewed

1 August 2020 9:00 am

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?

16 May 2020 9:00 am

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

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

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

29 February 2020 9:00 am

As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in…

Fabulous and enthralling: Parasite reviewed

7 February 2020 10:00 pm

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…

The best Terminator film since the first: Terminator Six reviewed

26 October 2019 9:00 am

The first Terminator film, which came out in 1984, was a high-concept sci-fi serial killer thriller. You can just imagine…

Sian Clifford as Claire and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag

Promising but, compared to the first series, short of laughs: Fleabag reviewed

9 March 2019 9:00 am

BBC2’s MotherFatherSon announced its status as a classy thriller in the traditional way: by ensuring that for quite a long…

Not like any serial-killer thriller you’ve seen before: Beast reviewed

28 April 2018 9:00 am

When I first read that Beast is a serial-killer thriller my heart sank like a stone — yet more women…

My knuckles went pure white and have yet to return to full colour: Custody reviewed

14 April 2018 9:00 am

Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the…

Hideously watchable: Nicole Kidman as ophthalmologist Anna and Colin Farrell as surgeon Steven

Hideously watchable: Killing of a Sacred Deer reviewed

4 November 2017 9:00 am

You know where you aren’t with director Yorgos Lanthimos. The Greek allegorist creates parallel worlds which superficially resemble our own.…

More secrets and symbols

28 October 2017 9:00 am

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…