tv
Hacks, Season 3, NOW review - acerbic showbiz comedy keeps up the good workWednesday, 19 February 2025
Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition. Read more... |
Surviving Black Hawk Down, Netflix review - the real story behind Ridley Scott's Oscar-winnerFriday, 14 February 2025
Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous actors, though its gung-ho depiction of the heroics of American special forces during the appalling Somalian civil war always felt a little uncomfortable. Read more... |
Vietnam: The War That Changed America, Apple TV+ review - painful and poignant stories from a terrible conflictMonday, 03 February 2025
It’s been 50 years since the USA bowed to the inevitable and pulled out of Vietnam, in the midst of harrowing scenes of anguish and chaos. Read more... |
Paradise, Disney+ review - enigmatic drama with an unknown destinationSaturday, 01 February 2025
The latest from the This Is Us creator, Dan Fogelman, is a futuristic take on relationships among survivors once Earth has suffered an extinction event, a popular concept in these troubled times. Except that it starts out by following an equally popular narrative track, the classic locked-door whodunit. Where is this heading? Read more... |
Prime Target, Apple TV+ review - the appliance of scienceThursday, 23 January 2025
An opening sequence of a drone flying over a busy street in Baghdad, followed by a huge explosion that leaves many casualties and a gaping hole where a row of buildings used to be, suggests that Prime Target is going to be another special forces, war-on-terror type of drama. Read more... |
Out There, ITV1 review - drugs and thugs disfigure the Welsh landscapeWednesday, 22 January 2025
If nothing else, ITV’s new thriller Out There is a fabulous advertisement for the Welsh countryside. Many scenes were shot in Brecon and the Black Mountains, amid acres of wild, rambling moorland and majestic hillsides. But it’s not always a happy place. Here, farmer Nathan Williams (Martin Clunes) is trying to hang on to his family business, but profits are low, overheads are high, and the recently widowed Nathan isn’t as young as he used to be. Read more... |
What's the Matter with Tony Slattery?, BBC Two review - absorbing but troubling search for answersWednesday, 15 January 2025
In the late Eighties and Nineties, Tony Slattery became one of the most ubiquitous faces on television, appearing regularly on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For You while popping up in quizzes and sitcoms all over the place (as well as in the movies Peter’s Friends and The Crying Game). He even became a film critic for a while, hosting Saturday Night at the Movies. Read more... |
American Primeval, Netflix review - nightmare on the Wild FrontierMonday, 13 January 2025
It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set in the 1850s, and is based around the real-life massacre of settlers travelling from Arkansas to California by the Mormon militia known as as the Nauvoo Legion. This took place at Mountain Meadows, Utah, apparently triggered by rising tensions between the US federal government and Mormon leader Brigham Young. Read more... |
SAS Rogue Heroes, Series 2, BBC One review - Paddy Mayne's renegade warriors invade ItalyWednesday, 01 January 2025
Having carved a swathe of terror and destruction through the Axis forces in North Africa, the SAS return for a second series (again written by Steven Knight, and with another rockin’ soundtrack featuring the likes of The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” and Magazine’s very apt “Shot by Both Sides”). Read more... |
The Split: Barcelona, BBC One review - a soapy special with seasonally adjusted sentimentalityMonday, 30 December 2024
Maybe it was the timing, even though most of the action takes place in bright sunlight, that made The Split’s two-parter uncharacteristically soft-centred. This was a Christmas-but-filmed-last-summer special, often a guarantee of a mushy mash-up. And indeed, it was as if writer Abi Morgan had started channelling Richard Curtis. Read more... |
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