England
Unforgotten, Series 3, ITV review - death on the M1Monday, 16 July 2018
So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga. The understated rapport of lead duo DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) has become one of TV’s... Read more... |
DVD: New Town UtopiaFriday, 13 July 2018
You come to Christopher Ian Smith’s New Town Utopia expecting a damning indictment of post-war British planning. But while there are melancholy moments, this is mostly an upbeat documentary. Smith manages, without the use of CGI, to make the much-... Read more... |
Postcards from the 48% review - wistful memorial to forgotten valuesSaturday, 07 July 2018
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single... Read more... |
Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, BBC Two review - blues, booze and duesSunday, 01 July 2018
There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has... Read more... |
The Bookshop review - lost in translationSaturday, 30 June 2018
"All this fuss over a bookstore?!" That's likely to be a common reaction to Spanish director Isabel Coixet's The Bookshop, which adapts a slender if much-admired 1978 novel by the quintessentially English Penelope Fitzgerald in order to cock a... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Wilton's Music Hall review - a stereotype-smashing evening of pagan delightsFriday, 29 June 2018
The Faction’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a production in which women are more likely to kick ass than sleep with one – a muscular, mischievous take on the Bard’s most light-hearted play about forbidden love. As might be expected, this boldly... Read more... |
The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Grange Festival review - enjoyable if conventional productionMonday, 25 June 2018
Just as the Last Night of the Proms is an end-of-term party with a concert tacked on, The Grange Festival (like other similar venues) offers a massive picnic interspersed with some opera. Unlike the Proms, however, where anyone can get in wearing... Read more... |
Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, Wilton's Music Hall review - pure entertainmentFriday, 08 June 2018
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment. On a stage of packing boxes and boards, over the course of just over an hour, Paterson Joseph relays and plays the life of... Read more... |
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One, Tate Britain review - all in the mindTuesday, 05 June 2018
Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims. Heavy censorship... Read more... |
King Lear, BBC Two review - modernised TV adaptation is a mixed blessingTuesday, 29 May 2018
Some have contended that King Lear is unstageable, and perhaps it’s unfilmable too. Richard Eyre‘s new version for the BBC sets Shakespeare’s most remorselessly bleak tragedy in a pseudo-modern Britain where historic stately homes co-exist with... Read more... |
A Very English Scandal, BBC One review - making a drama out of a crisisMonday, 21 May 2018
There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in... Read more... |
On Chesil Beach review - perfect playing in a poignant Ian McEwan adaptationSunday, 20 May 2018
Ian McEwan has said that he decided to adapt his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach for the screen himself at least partly because he did not want anyone else to do so (with earlier works, including Atonement, he was glad not to have taken on the adaptation... Read more... |
- 1 of 33
- ››
