TV
Adam Sweeting
While Homeland is hardly unique in being a TV series born in the shadow of 9/11, it may prove to be one of the most resonant and troubling responses to that ghastly event and its aftermath. Sergeant Nick Brody, who went missing with a fellow Marine sniper in Iraq in 2003, is found alive by a Special Forces team raiding a safe house used by notorious terrorist Abu Nazir. He is brought back to the USA as a shining symbol of War on Terror heroism, stoically addresses his fellow Marines at Edwards Air Force Base, and is ferried home through jostling reporters to try to pick up the traces of his Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
You remember Upstairs Downstairs – the lavish 2010 period drama-cum-soap based around servants and their masters that had the misfortune of not being named Downton Abbey. Making its entrance some three months after ITV’s series despite being filmed first, Upstairs played like the indignant, overshadowed elder sibling to Downton’s effervescent, effortlessly successful young upstart. After all, in a drama war between the BBC and ITV, there can’t be many who were betting on the latter coming out on top in either ratings or critical terms, especially given the 40-year-old pedigree of the Upstairs Read more ...
josh.spero
He was uncompromising, honest, personal. He didn't like doing what he was told. He never followed fashion. Is this an accurate picture of Lucian Freud, or is it a description of almost every great artist who ever lived? The intensely banal voiceover for Lucian Freud: Painted Life on BBC Two which contained these insights (at least in the rough cut I viewed) made it seem like a painter out on his own, stringent in his artistic pursuit, was something we had never seen before. Thankfully the talking heads, intimates of Freud, created a properly personal portrait.The tension between the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you don't fancy any more masters-and-servants dramas on a Sunday evening, you can thank Channel 4 for bringing the excellent Homeland to its Sunday roster. Kicking off tonight, it arrives in the UK basking in Golden Globe glory, having picked up accolades for Best Drama Series and Best Actress in a Drama Series in last month's ceremony. The latter went to Claire Danes for her performance as CIA counter-terrorist officer Carrie Mathison.The premise of Homeland is that US Marine Sergeant Nick Brody (Damian Lewis, also Globe-nominated) has been freed from eight years in Al Qaeda captivity in Read more ...
ash.smyth
Right, out with it: who else had their Valentine’s dinner-out ruined by 36 consecutive requests for Whitney Houston? Not even the entire back-catalogue, either: just “(And I-ee-I-ee-) I…”, over and over.I mean, the basic message is all right, I guess; but knowing what one knew about the recently departed – i.e. that she was recently departed – didn't really help with the whole romantic mood (if you know what I’m saying). And then what was on telly when we got home? The Bodyguard. Of course it was. The whole point of which movie being, by the way, that, notwithstanding her bad-girl Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anything new to say about becoming a parent? Not really. But about 20 years ago it certainly looked that way. It was around the time feminism had gone mainstream, and also when newspapers began swelling in size and needed extra content, so columnists started writing a great deal about motherhood. They reported from the frontline of epidurals and breastfeeding as if it was breaking news, as if they were the first generation ever actually to give birth. This egregious phenomenon flew in the face of the wise old saying that your own baby is of course the greatest miracle, but no one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Further advancing the theory that television is the place for pedigree actors to be seen nowadays, Dustin Hoffman makes his TV debut in HBO's Luck, which kicks off on Saturday 18 February on Sky Atlantic. A complex, multi-stranded saga about horse racing and the rich mix of characters who swarm around it, Luck is directed by Michael Mann (of Heat, Miami Vice and Manhunter fame) and written and created by David Milch, whose credits include NYPD Blue and Deadwood.Hoffman, who plays just-out-of-jail crime boss Chester "Ace" Bernstein, recalled how he'd finally been lured to the small screen." Read more ...
josh.spero
The most finely judged thing about Lowdown on BBC Four is how it takes the tradition of broad Australian humour and makes it broad enough to cover the Outback without causing a breach in laughter or taste. The taste in this comedy of hacks is, of course, bad, but that's what makes it so good. The bogan element in Australian culture - it's their equivalent of the hick - is turned into the comedy of the unspeakable, and is always very, very funny.Now, I'm not the first man to laugh about anal fissures - for yucks it's somewhere up there with lacemaking and Elizabethan constitutional history - Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know any old nonsense goes on Valentine's Day, but as it dragged itself towards the end of its allotted hour, Jo Brand's search for the meaning of kissing was being drowned out by a cacophonous din of barrels being scraped. Considering Brand's implacable hostility towards seeing people kissing - "There's far too much kissing going on these days, especially in public" was her opening salvo - it's amazing she wanted to make the programme at all. In the end, though, it was her neurotic eagerness to avoid kissing or being kissed that gave the film what little fascination it managed to generate Read more ...
fisun.guner
Daniel McGowan is a convicted terrorist. As a former leading member of the Earth Liberation Front, listed as the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist organisation, the thirtysomething New Yorker with a gentle, rather guileless demeanour was convicted in 2007 on multiple counts of arson and conspiracy. No one was killed during these attacks and no one has ever been killed or physically injured in the course of any ELF action. But that’s not to say we were meant to feel entirely sympathetic to McGowan or, indeed, to the ELF .This excellent film, by Sam Cullman and Marshall Curry, was balanced, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Zach Braff (b 1975) is overwhelmingly known as the star of Scrubs, the hugely popular American hospital comedy which came with a side order of surrealism. But fans of low-budget indie cinema will also cherish fond memories of Garden State, which he wrote, directed and starred in alongside Natalie Portman. It told of a young actor/waiter on anti-depressants who after nine years in LA comes home to New Jersey for his mother’s funeral and finds a panacea in the form of a beautiful, equally troubled young woman.After that promising debut, Braff retreated into silence. Pinioned for nine seasons in Read more ...
ash.smyth
Mea culpa. I take it all back. Christoph Waltz can act, and like a dream. You know, that dream you have where Tarantino's favourite pantomime Nazi demonstrates his apparently incurable fixation on apple-based desserts, and then Kate Winslet yakks all over his shoes. In fact, in Roman Polanski's oddly flat Carnage, I'd go so far as to say that Waltz is the only one really pulling his weight. It may be, of course, that this is just a side-effect of Yasmina Reza's French play being shipped across the Atlantic; but when Reza's Parisian characters did spite, you got all spitey with them. Read more ...