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Treasure Island, Sky1

Adam Sweeting Tuesday, 03 January 2012

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic swashbuckler has been made into countless films and TV series in several languages, and has survived Muppet Treasure Island as well as an interstellar Disney animation called Treasure Planet. Pleasingly, Sky1's new version made a fine addition to the lineage, combining a shrewdly picked cast with lush production values while retaining much of the darkness and menace of Stevenson's novel.

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2011: Reality 1, Art 0

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 02 January 2012

We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror?

Sherlock, Series 2, BBC One

graeme Thomson Monday, 02 January 2012

My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was.

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2011: Tinker Tailor Minchin Sheen

Jasper Rees Monday, 02 January 2012

On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative.

2011: The Triumph of Authenticity

mark Kidel Monday, 02 January 2012

In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising.

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2011: The British Are Climbing

Graham Fuller Saturday, 31 December 2011

My Top 10 movies of 2011, in order, are: Mysteries of Lisbon, Melancholia, Meek’s Cutoff, A Dangerous Method, Aurora, Hugo, The Princess of Montpensier, City of Life and Death, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris.

The Many Faces of Dame Judi Dench, BBC Two

Veronica Lee Saturday, 31 December 2011

It's interesting to consider at what point in someone's career does he or she become a national treasure - as Alan Bennett once so scathingly remarked, “If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize” - but there can surely be no debate about whether Dame Judi Dench deserves her status.

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2011: Morrissey, Manics and the Resurrection Shuffle

Bruce Dessau Saturday, 31 December 2011

I have always fought hard to resist nostalgia, but 2011 was the year when I succumbed. Maybe the present – and the future – was just too awful to contemplate, but I found myself constantly looking back. Whether it was onstage, onscreen or on a hand-held device the past seemed to provide the requisite cultural comfort food. Dessau Towers remains a dubstep-free zone.

2011: Siren Songs, Top Tales, and Farewell to the Mavericks

graeme Thomson Friday, 30 December 2011

We have, thankfully, long since moved beyond the point where there's any need to delineate or categorise works of art according to gender. However, looking back at 2011 it's hard to escape the conclusion that the most compelling music emerged from the mouths and minds of women.

Felix and Murdo, Channel 4/ Ben Hur, Channel 5

Adam Sweeting Thursday, 29 December 2011

I love the idea of Armstrong & Miller. Alexander Armstrong has his odious toff routine off to a tee, the clubbable rotter who'll cheat at golf, get you to pay for all the whisky sours in the clubhouse, and then shag your wife. Alongside, Ben Miller exists in a cloud of brainy abstraction, convinced that his serial bungling failures are merely the prelude to roaring success.