sat 19/07/2025

tv

Picnic at Hanging Rock, BBC One review - camp girls' school gothic

Jasper Rees

How many people were watching Picnic at Hanging Rock as it took its bow on BBC One? This opening episode happened to be preceded by a rival attraction on ITV.

Read more...

Sharp Objects, Sky Atlantic review - Amy Adams battles her demons

Adam Sweeting

Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations.

Read more...

Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars, BBC Two review - blues, booze and dues

Adam Sweeting

There’s undoubtedly a memorable film to be crafted from the life of guitar legend and grand old survivor Eric Clapton – for instance, Melvyn Bragg made a very good South Bank Show about him in 1987 – but the longer this one goes on, the less it has to say. Nor is it obvious why it has been made now.

Read more...

Duran Duran: There's Something You Should Know / A Night In, BBC Four, review - chaps on film

Jasper Rees

Forty years on. You could have got attractive odds on Duran Duran still being here when, on a yacht carving the seas off Antigua, a cream-suited Simon Le Bon mimed “Rio” astride an unapologetically phallic bowsprit. “A ripple in a stagnant pool,” sniffed the NME upon first catching them live.

Read more...

Reporting Trump's First Year: the Fourth Estate, BBC Two review - all hands on deck at the Gray Lady

Adam Sweeting

The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming?

Read more...

Natural World: The Super Squirrels, BBC Two review - silliness and facts

Katherine Waters

Squirrels are a breed as diverse as they are ubiquitous: they inhabit environments as extreme as desert and tundra, and all the lush greenery, rainforest and urban jungle imaginable between. So bless the producers of The Super Squirrels who humorously avoid a straight-down-the-line profile of the nearly 300 species around the world and instead showcase their not inconsiderable abilities through a series of gleeful reality TV piss-takes.

Read more...

Julius Caesar, BBC Four review - electrifying TV launch of all-women Shakespeare trilogy

David Nice

Who would have thought, when Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Julius Caesar opened to justified fanfare, that two more Shakespeare masterpieces would be sustained no less powerfully within the women's-prison context over the following years?

Read more...

Panorama: Putin's Russia with David Dimbleby, BBC One review - jolly football weather

Tom Birchenough

There was a lovely moment at the beginning of this Panorama where David Dimbleby was chatting to a schoolgirl – not just any schoolgirl actually, because she came from a family of 10 children, which surely makes her a bit out of the ordinary, even in...

Read more...

Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets Tarantino

Mark Sanderson

Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate).

Read more...

Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in Snowdonia

Adam Sweeting

Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.

Read more...

Pages

 

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Album: Bonnie Dobson & The Hanging Stars - Dreams

What a great album – and what a great story to lift the heart in these fetid times. A story that crosses oceans and decades and brings together a...

Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like...

Poor Clare, Orange Tree Theatre review - saints cajole us si...

What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons...

Album: Alex Warren - You'll Be Alright, Kid

The best-selling single so far this year in the UK is ...

That Bastard, Puccini!, Park Theatre review - inventive comi...

Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the...

Hamlet, Buxton International Festival review - how to re-ima...

Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a...

Friendship review - toxic buddy alert

The frenetic brand of humour that Tim Robinson brings to Friendship comes from a long lineage. There have...

Album: Slikback - Attrition

In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the...

Interview: Quinteto Astor Piazzolla on playing in London and...

“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered...