drama
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Breezy” isn't a word we associate with Ray Winstone. We’re more used to something like “big slab o’ bastard”, the epithet he got (they were biased Glaswegians, admittedly) most recently for his appearance in Robert Carlyle’s The Legend of Barney Thomson.So to see him jauntily singing along to Sinatra at the beginning of Alan Whiting’s three-parter The Trials of Jimmy Rose looked different. Admittedly he was walking away from 12 years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (not his first stretch, either), and being met in a Bentley suggested that probation wasn’t exactly going to be a hardship stint. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
En Équilibre addresses the impact of disabling and irreparable injury, thwarted ambitions, the questionable practices of insurers, and the connection between two dissimilar, yet both frustrated, characters. Despite its different strands, the film adeptly draws them together into a coherent and unexpectedly enthralling whole.The director of En Équilibre (In Harmony) is Denis Dercourt. His benchmark film The Page Turner (2006) echoes through En Équilibre. Both feature a female would-be concert pianist who has ended up in a job which frustrates (at a solicitors rather than, in En Équilibre, an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What exactly do we expect when a drama opens with the declaration, “This is a true story”? The Scandalous Lady W, based on Hallie Rubenhold’s biography Lady Worsley’s Whim, brought us some unusual 18th century marriage shenanigans that ended in one of the most scandalous court cases of the era. But, despite its central legal scenes, “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t the order of the day.David Eldridge’s screenplay instead adjusted details to strengthen what would have anyway been a very acute commentary on the status of women in society, and particularly within Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Poirot curls an eyebrow and Miss Marple twinkles, but there haven't been a lot of out-and-out laughs in Agatha Christie’s television career. Partners in Crime comes as a pleasurable surprise. It stars David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a married couple on their uppers who take up detective work almost by accident.The Beresfords had a long career: Christie wrote the first novel to feature them in 1922 and the fourth in 1973. There were also some short stories collected as Partners in Crime, each a spoof of other crime writers including Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The best that can be said of The Face of an Angel is that it’s based around an interesting idea. Instead of dramatising the story of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and what surrounded the case, director Michael Winterbottom has instead fashioned a film in which serial director of flop films Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) has arrived in Siena to scope out how to adapt a book on the case, then in its court appeal phase, by American journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale). For the purposes of The Face of an Angel, Kercher has been renamed Elizabeth Pryce, the accused and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Somewhere in rural Italy around the border of Umbria-Lazio and Tuscany, a family is trying to make the best of trying circumstances. Their mainstay is the production of honey. They have sheep. There are blackberries on their land. But money is short. Despite the fact that her irascible German father Wolfgang is seemingly in charge, it’s actually 12-year-old Gelsomina who runs the show. The Wonders is told from her point of view: the perspective of a child with three younger sisters forced to grow up and take on responsibilities for which she has no training. Gelsomina has to deal with what Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, documenting the Allies' mission to stop the Nazis from going nuclear, is to historical accuracy what David Starkey is to tact. Or common decency. The Saboteurs however, a Norwegian/Danish/British TV co-production, seems to be keener to explore the truth behind the mission. Or at least as much of it as is known.After the first episode’s slow, measured pace, we began the second in a secret military base in Scotland with a stronger sense of urgency. If we had any doubts as to just how urgent things were, these were soon quashed as the entire plan was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Pinpointing exactly what makes Force Majeure so disquieting is difficult, and a second viewing on DVD confirms this. Overall, the elements of the film are unified so smoothly that focusing on any one of them doesn’t indicate the unexpectedly powerful effect of Ruben Östlund’s dissection of the collapse of male character.The impact could be a result of the director and writer's avowed reversal of the filmic hero trope. It could be Johannes Kuhnke’s intense depiction of father Tomas’s denial and subsequent breakdown in the wake of his transgression. Or it could be that such a sensitive theme Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Drama is all about secrets revealed, discoveries unfurled. Black Work was straight into that territory from the first scene. A man and a woman sat in a car, taking the solace from each other that they couldn’t find at home. As ever in such a scenario, you promptly wondered if or when they’d be caught in the act. This was especially so given that the woman was played by Sheridan Smith, who starred in just such an adultery drama not that long ago.She sounded keener on rescuing her marriage to a mostly absent husband. But the next time he went out to work he failed to come back. The sight of a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A young man, in trouble with drunk or drugs, returns to his Scottish family riven by dark secrets? Of course, it’s a new Iain Banks dramatisation, the first since the author’s death two years ago. This version of his 2012 novel Stonemouth attempts to recreate the success the BBC enjoyed with its 1996 adaptation of Banks’s Crow Road. Compressing a near-400 pages of fiction into two hours’ television requires a thicket of flashbacks that tests the viewer’s recall, and piles coincidence a little high in places, though enjoyable lead performances, and Banks’ gripping, if familiar, preoccupations Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite its 19th-century setting, John Schlesinger’s film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd – released to cinemas in 1968 – is a very Sixties film. Amongst the themes of the novel which resonated then are class differences, female self-determination, the guises adopted to steer perceptions of the self and repression: all very relevant in 1960’s Britain as society sought to re-invent itself. Casting the then-hot Julie Christie and Terence Stamp further stressed the film was of the moment. As Frank Troy, Stamp could have been a poster boy for the voguish nostalgia embodied Read more ...