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The Honourable Woman is hardly a light-hearted comedy romp at the best of times, but the sixth episode – which opens with a rape and ends with a young boy shooting himself – is bleaker than a Dartmoor funeral. Like a spindle of black cotton unravelling, ‘The Mother Line’ is dark from the first and … >
‘Secrets are weird,’ Ephra Stein (Andrew Buchan) tells sister Nessa (Maggie Gyllenhaal). ‘People think you share them – but you don’t.’ Not if you’re a selfish, narcissistic, emotionally-stunted handpump hopelessly in thrall to the Israeli government, MI5 and your own penis, perhaps. But if you’re the best British drama series of 2014 (note to Hugo … >
Giving drama a backdrop of contemporary world events is a double-edged sword. While it lends realism and gravitas to a story that might otherwise be as fantastic as it is fantastic (as it were), it can also be like trying to use a live tiger as a sofa: there’s a real danger of it biting … >
It’s probably a bit early to be reaching for True Detective-sized superlatives when discussing The Honourable Woman. Yet with each instalment surpassing the last, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to resist. Comparisons with Nic Polazzo’s acclaimed thriller are both fitting and inappropriate. The suspense that hangs over Hugo Blick’s serial like Victorian smog, making it almost … >
Life is rarely kind to Nessa Stein. The little girl who saw her daddy stabbed in the neck by a waiter (for being boss of an arms company rather than failing to leave a decent tip) has grown up rich and successful as a result of running the family business – but it has come … >
Three years after the sometimes preposterous, frequently gory, entirely entertaining The Shadow Line, writer and director Hugo Blick is back with another satisfyingly noir-ish thriller: lighter on the operatic excess than its predecessor, but no less compelling – or less blood-spattered. Yet whereas The Shadow Line was a London immorality tale about criminals and corrupt … >
Rik Mayall’s greatest gift, exceeding both his ability for writing shrewd satire and side-splitting smut (often in a single line) and his boundless energy and enthusiasm for performance (he and Adrian Edmondson literally suffered for their art during recordings of Bottom and the subsequent, even more raucous stage shows), was the ability to make the … >
In the fictional world, there’s nothing quite like a good bad cop. From sleazy, utterly decadent moral vacuums like Harvey Keitel’s eponymous Bad Lieutenant to duplicitous departmental rats like Colin Sullivan, Matt Damon’s character in The Departed, there’s always a motorway of movie mileage to be obtained from bad apples. The same, of course, applies … >
‘I think, sir,’ a boatman from Cornwall famously once remarked to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘when Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.’
To celebrate the return of Sherlock, we’ve waded through the archives to see how Benedict Cumberbatch measures up against the greatest of Great Detectives.