mon 02/12/2024

tv

The Amazing Mr Blunden, Sky Max / The Mezzotint, BBC Two reviews - blundering Blunden eclipsed by M R James

Adam Sweeting

Friday night was Mark Gatiss night.

Read more...

The Girl Before, BBC One review - high-tech dream home contains many a heartache

Adam Sweeting

Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect?

Read more...

You Don't Know Me, BBC One review - true love meets inner-city crime wave

Adam Sweeting

I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.

Read more...

Hellbound, Netflix review - supernatural assassins usher in an age of terror

Adam Sweeting

Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive.

Read more...

The Beatles: Get Back, Disney+ review - 1969 revisited in Peter Jackson's three-part documentary

Adam Sweeting

A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now.

Read more...

Death of England: Face to Face, National Theatre at Home review - anti-racist trilogy ends with a bang

aleks Sierz

One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.

Read more...

Dopesick, Disney+ review - the harrowing inside story of America's OxyContin scandal

Adam Sweeting

“Drug companies are supposed to be honest,” says a lady from the Department of Justice, explaining why the US Food and Drug Administration had been treating the pharmaceutical industry with a light, indeed barely detectable, regulatory touch.

Read more...

Showtrial, BBC One review - drama a cut above the rest

Adam Sweeting

This latest offering from the ubiquitous World Productions (creators of Line of Duty, the farcical but strangely popular Vigil, Bodyguard etc etc) is a whodunnit, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, as it explores the mysterious disappearance and death of university student Hannah Ellis.

Read more...

Dalgliesh, Channel 5 review - doleful detective fails to fire on all cylinders

Adam Sweeting

Treading in the footsteps of Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, Bertie Carvel is a making a decent (albeit soporific) stab at embodying P D James’s introspective detective Adam Dalgliesh, though you have to wonder if he’s getting the help he needs from Channel 5.

Read more...

Temple, Series 2, Sky Max review - more calamitous adventures of rogue surgeon Daniel Milton

Adam Sweeting

It’s difficult to know how seriously to take Temple, Sky Max’s outlandish medical thriller about surgeon Dr Daniel Milton and his gothicky secret clinic, hidden under Temple tube station in London.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Currie, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - s...

Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme...

Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dubl...

How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the...

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Ta...

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial...

Album: Panelia - Nothing and All At Once

Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi...

Music Reissues Weekly: John Cale - The Academy in Peril, Par...

The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...

Blu-ray: Black Tuesday

The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major...

The Importance of Being Earnest, National Theatre review - n...

If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then...

Conclave review - secrets and lies in the Vatican's inn...

“You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain’t no neutral ground,” as Bob Dylan sang, but Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) isn’t...

Twelfth Night, Orange Tree Theatre review - perfectly pitche...

It's all too easy to underplay the melancholy of ...