thu 28/03/2024

Amazon Prime

Best of 2020: TV

Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. With large chunks of the population forced to...

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Little Fires Everywhere, Amazon Prime review - in every dream home a heartache

Reese Witherspoon has evolved into a growth industry on the new frontier of Big Television. Her production company Hello Sunshine has a heap of projects on the go with a range of networks, and following her success with Big Little Lies (for HBO),...

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One World: Together at Home livestream review - all eight hours of it!

What times. They cancelled Glastonbury. Festival season 2020 disappeared. Then certain potions and compounds associated with festivaling ran dry. Well, the latter exist, of course. There’s a fellow over the road who’s still selling talcum powder and...

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Selah and the Spades, Amazon Prime review - boarding-school cliques go gangster

“They always try to break you down when you’re 17,” says queen bee Selah (Lovie Simone) in Tayarisha Poe’s impressive directorial debut. As leader of the Spades, one of the five Mafia-style ruling factions in the exclusive Haldwell boarding-school...

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Hunters, Amazon Prime review - bringing God's justice to Nazis in America

Apparently network executives initially reacted with alarm to the premise of Hunters, Amazon’s new big-ticket series chiefly (though by no means entirely) notable for hosting Al Pacino’s first full-scale television role. Its story of Jewish Nazi-...

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Best of 2018: TV

Bruce Springsteen once sang about there being "57 channels and nothin' on". Those were the days. Now we have so much to watch (including Netflix's Springsteen on Broadway) that all the world's remaining elephants couldn't remember them all.But...

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Don Quixote rides again, and again

It’s a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his quests he sees virgins in prostitutes and castles in roadside inns. His adventures have spawned an adjective that describes delusional idealism, typified by the...

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The Light of the Moon, Amazon Prime review - coping with the unthinkable

This account of the aftermath of a sexual assault is handled with a clear-headed restraint and attention to detail that’s refreshing in the feverish post-Weinstein climate. The Light of the Moon (released on Amazon Prime) is the first feature by...

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Ripper Street, BBC Two, Series 5 review – apocalypse looms in Victorian Whitechapel

There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama. Now, as it embarks on its fifth and final season, there’s every reason to suppose that the...

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Best of 2016: TV

If there's one big question hanging over the television industry, it's "how long can the old broadcast networks survive in the new era of subscription and downloading services?" No doubt there will be a variety of answers, with different hybrid...

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The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime

The Jeremy Clarkson trio must have been vastly amused by the disastrous progress of the Chris Evans version of Top Gear, which staggered across our screens in the summer and prompted the new host to fall on his sword, but they shouldn't be resting...

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Crisis in Six Scenes, Amazon Prime

At the age of 80 Woody Allen has made his first television series. It’s for Amazon, which would suggest he knows how to move with the times. That would be a false impression, because Crisis in Six Scenes is vintage Allen in the sense that it's a...

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