Sarah Manvel 
The influence of The Zone of Interest is heavy on Two Prosecutors, a story about Stalinist terror that works as well as it does thanks to its discretion. It’s less about the sound design and more the enveloping knowledge of all the horrors out of frame. Anything that tried to …
Some years ago I went to Arles for the annual photography festival and discovered that, on Saturday nights, the local bullfighting school put on a show in the Roman amphitheatre. I paid my ten euros and watched three young matadors in training kill their bulls while the locals treated this …
Everybody clearly had a wonderful time making this episode of Carême, in which they either very politely make vicious threats to each other, or create a colossal mess. Best of all, nudity! Sorry, this is France: nudité. One bottom belongs to a male extra who has evidently just participated in …
What happens throughout this episode is, in the very best sense of the word, adult. Carême’s understanding that people’s motivations and people’s desires do not necessarily reflect their best selves is unknown in American art. But the French are perhaps more capable of acknowledging the gap between their best and …
The sumptuous Carême hits two basic needs for a high-end television series. One is for sex, but the other is rarer in fictional television: food porn. This combination is an absolutely wonderful idea, because god knows our appetite for something good to eat doesn’t always get its due from a …
The trouble with writers is that our work is not very cinematic. Watching someone type down their thoughts is only marginally more interesting than watching someone read a book. So it helps if the writer is easy to watch, whether that’s by being good-looking or from providing excellent archival footage …
This loving but very sad movie obeys a stereotype of Spanish cinema by handling a complex issue – in this case, domestic violence – through the eyes of a very small girl. The Spirit of the Beehive handled the Spanish civil war this way, as Summer 1993 handled AIDS and …
Rebecca Lenkiewicz will always be in the British history books as the first living female writer to have a play produced by The National Theatre. Her Naked Skin, staged in 2008, was about the violence involved as British women fought for the right to vote; my main memory is of …
Silver Star, a determinedly quirky little movie, is a throwback to the indie cinema of the nineties in the best way. It stands and falls entirely on the actions of two unpredictable people, thrown together through a combination of foolishness and bad decisions, and who stick together through a combination …
And now, man without fear, he must face the final curtain: except of course it isn’t. Like James Bond (RIP), Reacher will return. The zeitgeist can be guessed at and striven for, but it cannot be faked and it cannot be bought, because the audience never knows what truly speaks …
Zeitgeisty trends combine in Peacock: how it mocks the vapid wealthy with lives so comfortable they must manufacture problems for themselves is clearly inspired by the work of Ruben Östlund. The problem is that social satire works best with a strong opinion about the behaviour being mocked. Are you teasing …
The only flaw in the magnificent The Return is that, by virtue of the casting, the audience is able to predict the plot before the characters can. This is however an extremely small complaint in the grand scheme of an unusually subtle and thoughtful war movie. For one thing, it’s …
It’s a new dawn on Reacher. This is the first episode of the entire show in which Reacher (the splendid Alan Ritchson) goes west of the Mississippi! While Neagley (Maria Sten) lives in Chicago, Reacher’s previous adventures have kept him in Georgia, Arkansas, New York City, Maine, and now Massachusetts. …
Unusually, September 5 faced one main question before its release: why has it been made? Well, since the last presidential inauguration, we have our answer. September 5 is one of those biopic-style (but not a documentary) re-enactments of tragic real-world events. Here the disaster is at the 1972 Munich Olympics, …
Well. If we thought the previous episode of Reacher was plot heavy, in Smoke on the Water all those plot points have babies, meaning there’s an entire family tree of stuff going on that, thanks to the spoiler restrictions from Amazon, reviewers cannot reveal. It’s understandable since so much modern-day …
The news that Amazon are now the owners of the James Bond franchise has landed with some surprise amidst this new season of Reacher. It’s not so much the sale but the fact that the Broccoli family, who creatively controlled the series for over fifty years, relinquished those creative rights …
I will bet a hundred billion dollars the character of Dominique Kohl (Mariah Robinson) was named after the heroine of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s smash-hit novel from 1943 that introduced the political philosophy of objectivism to the world. Objectivism has been an incredibly influential ethos in economics and politics in …
Long Day’s Journey into Night has been a core of the theatrical canon since its 1956 debut. It won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for its author, Eugene O’Neill, and has been in worldwide repertory ever since. The role of the mother, Mary Tyrone, is one of the best in the …
Dawn breaks over the Maine countryside as Duke (Donald Sales) and Reacher (the remarkable Alan Ritchson) drive back to the compound and discuss the infuriating Angel Doll (Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz). In the kitchen, Reacher tries to glean intel from housemaid Annette (Caitlin McNerney) and sharp-tongued English chef Agnes (Helen Taylor), though …
This second episode of the new season of Reacher is a day without much sunshine. By which is meant Reacher (the magnificent Alan Ritchson) has only one physical fight in Truckin’. It is between Reacher and Paulie (Olivier Richters), the unpleasant thug who is literally double Reacher’s size. Fortunately, Reacher …