Thriller
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
The best of British
There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against…
Diabolical twists
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
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
Holiday park hell
Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish…
The Heckler: Why does anyone still rate Vertigo?
Here’s something that may interest you. Or not. (Could go either way.) I was looking over Sight & Sound’s ‘100…
Shock and gore
There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however,…
Seeking closure
As in many thrillers, the characters on display in Flesh and Blood (ITV, Monday to Thursday) often seemed locked in…
Space invaders
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
The first Terminator film, which came out in 1984, was a high-concept sci-fi serial killer thriller. You can just imagine…
Promising but, compared to the first series, short of laughs: Fleabag reviewed
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
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
Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the…
Hideously watchable: Killing of a Sacred Deer reviewed
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
Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…
Highly charged territory
I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the…
Nut job
The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a…
Art of darkness
Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative,…
Heavy-handed
Oliver Cotton is an RSC stalwart who looks like a man born to greatness. Google him. He has the fearless…
An innocent abroad
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
Bottom Gere
The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes…
A plague on all P-words
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
The Trump doctrine
Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a…
Are you being funny?
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
Pinter without the bus routes
David Mamet is Pinter without the Pinteresque indulgences, the absurdities and obscurities, the pauses, the Number 38 bus routes. American…
