Netflix
Adam Sweeting
It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers.This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines. Max Verstappen, for one, doesn’t like them much.Drive to Survive has been instrumental in turning F1 into a vast global Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The brainchild of Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, this is a strange and tortuous tale which defies easy categorisation. There’s plenty of humour in it but it isn’t a comedy, and it also lays out a long trail of tragedy and pain spanning generations. You might argue that there’s a bit of redemption on offer, but then again you might not.Anyway, the narrative revolves around three women in their late thirties, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Robyn (Sinead Keenan), close friends from childhood and now living in Belfast. Their old bonds are rekindled when they’re invited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The pitch for this movie might have been “Heat meets Miami Vice”, and it’s to the credit of writer/director Joe Carnahan that the finished result can stand toe to toe with those two without feeling any need to apologise. The Rip is also noteworthy for bringing back together those two grizzled old Bostonians, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-star and co-produce (and also negotiated a special bonus deal with Netflix for the cast and crew, depending on the film’s success).It’s a tough, tense tale of Miami cops battling against not only Colombian drug cartels but also shady goings-on within the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An opening sequence set in the Andalusian city of Ronda, with its spectacular bridge across the El Tajo gorge, seems to be setting us up for a torrid adventure in semi-tropical heat. Especially after a desperate-looking character finds himself alone in Ronda’s empty bullring, before a solitary bull comes thundering out of its enclosure and gores him to death.However, canonical Christie-ness subsequently reasserts itself, with the action moving back to green and pleasant old Blighty and a gaggle of posh party guests at the country house, Chimneys. Many of them seem to be rather dim chinless Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As one of the characters tells us: “There are two sides to every story… someone is always lying.” This telly-isation of Alice Feeney’s source novel, created by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by William Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt, picks up that idea and runs with it energetically. It pitches us into a vision of an American rural south which is plagued with deceit, guilt, simmering resentment and murderous intent dating back decades. No-one is entirely innocent, and at least one person is incredibly guilty.The plot orbits around a group of female classmates who grew up in the small Read more ...
theartsdesk
Analysts tell us that the UK’s top-rated TV show this Christmas was the King’s speech, with the Strictly Christmas special coming in a mere third. If this means anything at all, perhaps it’s just indicative of the bafflingly-expanding TV universe where it’s becoming impossible to keep tabs on everything that’s out there on a seemingly countless number of channels (and who on earth decided that “U&Drama” was a name to titillate the punters?). Even newspaper TV critics can’t seem to agree on what’s worth reviewing.But on the subject of U&Drama, they at least deserve a tip of the hat for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This follow-up to 2022’s Man vs Bee finds Rowan Atkinson reprising the role of Trevor Bingley, a bumbling no-hoper who is somehow still at large in the community. He’s now separated from wife Jess (Claudie Blakley), with whom his daughter Maddy (Alanah Bloor) has been living, and dwells alone rather forlornly in a remote house in the countryside.Quite why Atkinson (in collaboration with co-writer Will Davies) seems so invested in this hapless and rather pathetic character remains a mystery, since it eschews entirely what used to be Atkinson’s main strengths (eg sardonic delivery, deadpan but Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fierce, unpredictable, complex, cussed, commie. Seymour Hersh would probably admit to all those descriptions of him except the last. Now at last the man who has dominated investigative journalism for 60 years has agreed to be investigated himself for a documentary made by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 20 years after they first asked him.One could list the peaks of his career too – My Lai, Watergate, Abu Ghraib – recognising that these names also represent dark lows of modern American history. “Sy”, as he is known, claims that what a reporter personally believes isn’t the point, only what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She’s still best remembered for her portrayal of Carrie Mathison in Homeland, but Claire Danes is an actor with plenty of moves up her sleeve. In this eight-part drama penned by Gabe Rotter, she plays author Aggie Wiggs, renowned for her book Sick Puppy but now crippled by writer’s block. This is in the aftermath of her break-up with wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), following the death of their young son Cooper in a road accident, leaving Aggie living in splendid isolation in a mini-mansion in leafy Oyster Bay, Long Island. Indeed, this locale is so upscale that it has tempted real estate Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What defines a life? Money and success? Happiness? Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams employs a narrator, much as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven did, who fields big questions like those while drawing the audience in. Bentley’s voice is an omniscient one, its owner unseen. Like Malick, Bentley is scrutinising a small group of people living in a bygone era in a remote part of North America; Malick focused on the Texas panhandle, Bentley on small-town Idaho at the turn of the century. Here a logger called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) ekes out a tough, often isolated living, moving with the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
In his celebrated TV-series Gomorrah (based on the bestseller of the same name by author Roberto Saviano) Italian director Stefano Sollima depicted the mafia ridden neighbourhoods of Naples in its rawest form – without myth, without any gloomy underworld charm or even the slightest hint of supposed gangster morality. The message Sollima wanted to get across was clear: there are no role models, no heroes. No one is happy here. Now Sollima has taken on another real-life story without redemption. The new Netflix true crime series The Monster of Florence revisits one of Italy’s most haunting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The problem with making TV dramas about unsolved real-life murder mysteries is that they’re still unsolved, unless the film-makers decide to invent a fictional denouement. This might well trigger an avalanche of legal and ethical objections.Thus, director Stefano Sollima’s four-part examination of Italy’s notorious “Mostro di Firenze” murders, which left a trail of 16 dead bodies between 1968 and 1985, can only hint strongly at the identity of the perpetrator (the individual in question vanished in 1988, and no further murders subsequently took place). But Sollima’s ambitions reach beyond the Read more ...