TV drama
Tom Birchenough
Some of the best films this year have been the longest. The one most likely to be remembered is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, at a modest enough 165 minutes, followed soon after by Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish masterpiece Winter Sleep, at a weightier 196. Now, close to year end, along comes Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, bringing with it a considerable tinge of regret that outside a single theatrical outing at this year’s Venice Film Festival, this HBO miniseries is coming to us only on the small screen. At 232 minutes, no less.That’s because Cholodenko’s film is a masterpiece of often Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of this creepy Belfast-set crime thriller generated a mixture of critical enthusiasm and revulsion for its voyeuristic scenes of the sadistic murder of women. This season two opener [****] didn't give us any more of the latter, but successfully re-established the show's atmosphere of claustrophobic menace. It also probed further into the psychological battle between Gillian Anderson's DS Stella Gibson and Jamie Dornan's low-key but intensely deranged killer, Paul Spector.Writer/director Allan Cubitt seems to have found the ideal pace for his narrative, which moves with a kind Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We seem to have spent most of 2014 examining the social, political, historical, geographical and military ramifications of the First World War. You would have thought, therefore, that the upcoming Remembrance Sunday commemorations could have been allowed to stand alone, uncluttered by further efforts to explain or dramatise the events of 1914.But still the BBC felt the urge to give us this five-part drama by veteran EastEnders/Life on Mars writer Tony Jordan, about two young men – teenagers in fact – who rush to join the military at the outbreak of hostilities but soon discover that war is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Baffling paranormal thriller" is your drive-thru soundbite to describe Intruders, but despite a lingering threat of genre-cliché, it holds your attention with a very capable cast and some stylish cinematography. The action is set in Washington State and Oregon in the American Northwest (though it was apparently shot over the border in British Columbia), and the chilly, metallic light has a distinctly Scandinavian air.It was funded by BBC Worldwide and BBC Two and first shown on BBC America, where it scored healthy ratings. How interesting that a show aimed at the Stateside market, where they Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was tempting to assume that Homeland [****] had died along with Damian Lewis's Brody, last seen dangling gruesomely from a crane in Tehran at the end of series three, but this tense and uncomfortable season-opener suggested that all may not be lost. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) has been promoted to CIA station chief in Kabul, but she's finding that the personal price of professional success is growing exorbitantly high.At front and centre was the question of the legitimacy of killing the enemy at long distance by remote control (in Homeland's first series, it was a drone attack which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As unavoidable as death and taxes, as inevitable as the rotation of the seasons, Downton Abbey has created the illusion of time-hallowed permanence in a mere four years. It is often asked how long Julian Fellowes can keep up his script-writing heroics (if it was an American show he'd be marshalling a writing team of dozens), but this opener to series five was so playfully deft and thunderously enjoyable that you'd have to conclude that Downton has become Fellowes's personal fountain of youth.The trick is to embrace change while remaining solidly rooted in Downton's dynastic saga. What Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Common, Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC One drama about the effects of the joint enterprise law, seems at first sight to lack the topical horsepower of projects like Hillsborough. McGovern doesn’t disappoint, however, crafting from the apparent obscurity of an eighteenth-century statute intended to discourage aristocratic duels by implicating both parties a riveting, corkscrew-plotted narrative that brings to overdue public notice an easily abused and abusive regulation that today targets the opposite end of society.The didactic drive can, in lesser hands, flatten subtlety and exaggerate the obvious Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Here at theartsdesk we still receive the occasional missive from readers on several continents incensed at the BBC's axing of Zen in February 2011, a decision taken by then-controller of BBC One Danny Cohen. Zen didn't get a mention in Cohen's article in Wednesday's Times, entitled "Never mind the box-set brigade, let's celebrate British drama", but he managed to plug plenty of more recent BBC drama productions (and a couple from ITV, in a token attempt at even-handedness). It was as if a long list of titles would be enough to demonstrate the truth of his argument that British TV drama is Read more ...
Andy Plaice
They’re calling it Dublin noir and, on first showing, there’s something very stylish about the BBC’s new three-part drama starring Gabriel Byrne. Pubs and cigarette smoke and long, smouldering looks help the cause. There’s plenty of rain too, and a lot of grey and blue in John Alexander’s film, broken up by flashes of colour and arresting, unusual camera angles.Based on the books by John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black), Quirke boasts an impressive cast including Michael Gambon and Geraldine Somerville, with screenwriting duties shared by Andrew Davies, who penned this episode, and Conor Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's a bit of Gene Hunt revisited in Peter Bowker's new three-part drama. Philip Glenister returns to the Manchester stomping grounds he patrolled in Life on Mars, and he even drives an Audi (though it isn't Hunt's celebrated Quattro). But this time he's not a cop.It's 15 June 1996, the Euro 96 football championships are just swinging into action, and the Stone Roses and New Order are on the soundtrack. Glenister plays successful businessman Daniel Cotton, doing his best to patch up a poisonous family rift between his father Samuel (Bernard Hill, pictured below) and wayward, wastrel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.Though the series is named after the lurid serial publications popular in the 19th century, which featured the likes of Sweeney Todd and Sexton Blake, the trickiest part here is picking your way through the reverberations from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Swansea's much-mythologised son would have been 100 in October this year, but he died in New York in 1953, from a list of medical problems exacerbated by his colossal intake of alcohol. Thomas's doomed, chaotic trajectory could almost qualify as the first rock'n'roll death, since the New York that lionised him would soon hail the Beat poets, the Folk Revival and the Bob Dylan whose adopted name and freewheelin' versifying both bore Thomas's imprint.This film about his final days and death in New York was involving and hugely watchable, with Tom Hollander tackling the title role like a pocket- Read more ...