TV
fisun.guner
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is best known for two Holocaust films, both based on remarkable true stories: the 1990 Europa Europa and the 2011 release In Darkness. Here she tackles horror of the supernatural kind. This NBC two-parter is an updating of Ira Levin’s best-selling 1967 novel rather than a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic film, though it wouldn't matter either way, for while Polanski remained faithful to the book, this version of Rosemary’s Baby revises significant details. And in doing so, it cuts off the rich vein of elegantly spun dark humour that runs through the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I am picturing a scene in BBC4’s highly fortified underground headquarters, a conversation between its mastermind-in-chief and a hapless minion. “What do we do well, Stanley?” “History documentaries, boss.” “And what do people, according to the immutable proofs furnished by viewing figures, actually like?” “Ballroom dancing programmes, boss. Costume dramas. And unashamedly populist, good-looking young historians.” “Correct, Stanley. So waltz yourself over to the phone to get Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley to do us a three-part series on the history of ballroom dancing. I want Len in 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 ...
Veronica Lee
Joanna Scanlan and Vicki Pepperdine are two-thirds of the talented team (Jo Brand was the other) who brought us the excellent Getting On, now probably lost to UK screens after three series but which will appear in an American format next year. Now the duo have co-written and star in Puppy Love, about a dog trainer on The Wirral; but whereas Getting On - a quiet, gently paced and often moving comedy set in the NHS - delivered its humour with great subtlety, Puppy Love (directed by Susan Tully) is frantic and obvious.Take the slogan emblazoned on the side of Nana V's (Scanlan) van, advertising Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On and on the stately galleon sails. The fifth wodge of Downton Abbey has been light on utter knuckle-gnawing preposterousness. Plots conjured up at random from thin air have been in slightly shorter supply than usual. The very worst you can say of it is that Lord Fellowes is no Agatha Christie. The poor old blighted Bateses have now been subject to a matching pair of cack-handed murder mysteries. To get accidentally banged up once in a slow-moving crime plot may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like cluelessness.Last night brought further proof that the upper classes are just as capable Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s supposed to represent everything simple and homely, for a white audience at least, its tales of God, family and heartbreak the stuff of everyday America. For British listeners, more at home with “Parklife’s” dirty pigeons and cups of tea than Dolly Parton or Johnny Cash, the cultural background needs more sketching in, and BBC Four had its work cut out telling the story of a city, and a music both so familiar and so exotic.The programme’s procession of talking heads had to cover the ground rapidly, without the slick editing of, say, the HBO-made Sonic Highways, in which Dave Grohl and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
David Attenborough’s characteristically soothing narration again described the unceasing struggle for survival in the animal world. In astonishing films from all over the world, we witnessed an enormous variety of tactics for finding homes that not only provided shelter, but protection. In nature, he told us, good homes are all too rare, and we were treated to some not-so-subtle allusions to our own housing crises.This episode, subtitled Home, opened by visiting a bushy glade in the huge Zambian plain where a dozen wild dog pups were guarded by an adult male babysitter, as the other Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Broadmoor is not a prison. It just looks like one, as reiterated by umpteen craning shots which prowled around the Victorian red-brick exterior, assessing its brute institutional heft from every angle. For the first time, and after five years of negotiation, cameras have been allowed to document what happens inside this mythologised sanctum. Is it really the chamber of horrors of popular imagination? Is this where society’s malignantly insane are locked away for our better safety?Broadmoor’s staff are complicit in preserving its secrets. Rather than admit to working there and then spend hours Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
How odd to recall that Michael Portillo was the Thatcherite brat they loved to hate, the man whose 1997 defeat at Enfield Southgate would have caused a Twitter meltdown had the 140-character phenomenon been invented in time. Today's repackaged Portillo has blossomed in all directions, from being a stalwart on The Moral Maze and Andrew Neil's This Week to documentaries about capital punishment and mental health. You could almost suspect he had something of the Lib-Dem about him these days, Euroscepticism aside of course. And then there's his ongoing infatuation with railways. After four 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 ...
Jasper Rees
Given the long shadow cast by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, it’s sort of surprising that no drama department has commissioned something like The Missing before. It’s not the same story of course. The child alluded to in the title is a five-year-old boy, not a three-year-old girl, and he’s abducted in France rather than Portugal. But it’s impossible not to be aware of the story’s factual parallel. And the parental trauma as the awful truth dawns is, one can only imagine, exactly the same.The difference is that The Missing is shaping up to be a thriller. A thriller by its very nature Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as Kirchner, Beckmann and Klimt flashed before our eyes. Thus began an exploration into how Hitler – a failed art student -– acted out his hatred of the great art of the 20th-century avant garde, which he thought to be as sickly and degenerate as the Jews he was also determined to destroy.Yet it was German Jews who in the main collected and supported Read more ...