Reviews

You know you've never opened up about this kind of stuff before," says the friend of the main character halfway through the first episode, and it's another in a series of clumsy attempts to create a backstory for a character, who nevertheless feels paper thin and utterly Unbelieveable. Through the first two episodes of this miniseries, Kat Donovan, detective, is lonely and looking for love, but she's also still missing the boyfriend that walked out on her 11 years before, just after her cop father was murdered. And now, wouldn't you know it, not only does the missing boyfriend match with her on a dating app but, the same day, she hears that the imprisoned murderer of her father, in prison with cancer, has been given days to live. After 11 years of drifting aimlessly, now everything she thought was behind her is pressing in on her again.

So far, so utterly ridiculous. Instead of being angry at the unexplained return of the man who abandoned, she's making coy glances to her phone like a besotted teen, remembering the joys of young love; and when she manages to get into the prison, illegally, to see the dying murderer and demand to know his reasons for killing her father, the plank that is supposed to be the barely alive man mistakes her for his sister and spills the beans: he wasn't the real murderer at all. The real murderer... And then her phone rings and a colleague from her office asks her to guess who was visiting the prison in the days before the murder (a phone call no one thought to make for 11 years!), who but her ghostly boyfriend. Dah-dah-DAH!

This is so horribly badly written that it's almost funny, and the actors, probably sensing it, look completely uncomfortable throughout, as if wondering to themselves is it unemployment and social welfare for the rest of my life after this ....

Harlan Coben (among others) has created yet another steaming pile of refuse for Netflix to pour through your digital letterbox. Destroy your TV or device screen by watching it, then your brain.

What an absolute treat for fans of directorial indulgence, tedious narrative voiceovers, apparently endless and joyless scenes (all the erotic charge of a visit to the dentist or, should that be, the gynaecologist), and delivered with a sense of pacing that makes Boccaccio's Decameron or the Canterbury Tales look like a 100-meter dash.

Disclaimer starts off with considerable promise. The youthful dark deeds of a successful writer coming back to haunt her is not the worst premise, and in the form of a book that some stranger has penned and then published to item her scandalous self-obsession and oh-so/carefully managed dubious character. But quickly though, it all goes sliding downhill, though perhaps not quickly enough.

If ever there was a TV series that could have had at least half of its seven episodes consigned to the dustbin, Disclaimer is it. And adding to the aforementioned directorial indulgence is a narrative voiceover so ubiquitous you wonder if you'd left the radio in in another room. My partner and I kept hoping it was going to get better, the way one does, I suppose, with measles or a headache or another familiar domestic affliction. But when a drowning scene lasts long enough to leave and go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea (and even to drink it) and still come back to find the glug-glug-glug still going on with all the self-congratulatory Hans Zimmer-esque soundtracking such 'intense drama' apparently requires, well that was the point of departure for me. Facing another three hours of this brain custard, I gave up.

Disclaimer. I am an adult viewer and had the novel idea that an editor should have been allowed to work on this before it was released to the viewing public. Even masturbating teenage boys, about whom some of the story revolves and for whom, clearly, many of these sex scenes were included and at great length, will give up and start tidying their bedrooms instead. So, I suppose, the series does at least have a purpose after all.

What a complete and utter mess this show is, from the almost entirely incoherent plot lines (such as they are) to the lame, inconsequential dialogue to bafflingly inept direction. Scenes are built up to a big, thrilling moment only to dissolve into head-scratching confusion. Twice I jumped to the start of the next episode thinking the directorial blancmange at the end of the previous one MUST have been artist intentional only to find that, well, it wasn't. The characters are ludicrously crude cartoon stereotypes, the action scenes are hilariously awkward and poorly edited, and the dogs that are the only saving grace of a show where the humans are instantly forgettable all seem to get hanged by the intimidating 'bad guys' that haunt the margins of this plotless quicksand. Not bearable, even as a joke. Why would anyone make something as dumb. The actors must have been mortified to see themselves on screen.

In the style of an 80s Batman (complete with cartoonishly shallow characters and utterly predictable dialogue) this is a show about AIDS, child abuse, racism, drink and drug dependency, and psychosis, but seems pitched for an adolescent (at most) audience. An unbelieveable mess, made worse by its cloying and overbearing sentimentality. Benedict Cumberbatch, who is normally very watchable and occasionally compulsively so, seems embarrassed throughout by the histrionics of the plot. In fact the only thing that recommends this risible nonsense is a half-decent soundtrack that includes The Cure (out of chronology) and Velvet Underground. AVOID.

In The Golden Hour, an Afghani immigrant to the Netherlands has worked his way up to become a respected police detective.

But when a childhood friend from the same village in Afghanistan turns up in Amsterdam, out of the blue, rumours in the Afghan community suggests that trouble might be brewing, and next thing, right on time, there's a major terrorist incident.

Not only, however, does this confirm to our hero Mardik that he was right to suspect something was afoot, but it also improbably confirms to him that the boy he knew, aged seven all those years ago, is one of the fiendish perpetrators.

Cue the most ridiculous, old-fashioned, maverick cop on the run scenario, where our hero, instead of explaining his suspicions and fears to his boss and the other police colleagues, decides to go off and find a cell of four trained terrorist assassins entirely on his own, at one stage even shooting over the heads of his uniformed colleagues to warn them to keep away.

If this kind of risible, over-the-top nonsense is the best story that can be made about the debacle of the American and Allies' retreat from Afghanistan and the dangers which followed, then Europe is surely in need of someone to save it.

In a word, rubbish.

I confess to not having read the book. Someone in another review here mentions Hallmark, and ten minutes into this movie version of the bestseller, Hallmark is exactly what I was thinking. Everything about the simplifications of this story fit that kind of grossly simplified moral world. Here's a young girl somehow surviving in a swamp, in a shack in a swamp, first with her brutalizing father who has driven his wife and other children away, and then entirely on her own, with no obvious means of support except a small bit of fishing, which would hardly put food on the table, let alone provide for all her needs, clothes, home maintenance etc.

Next we meet the black couple who run the local convenience store, and begin to take pity on her, and then we cut to the present tense, where she's inexplicably, with no evidence, up in court in a kind of to-kill-a-mocking-bird atmosphere, accused of the murder of a body that was found in the opening scene. If this is not feeling contrived, I'm not reviewing it well, because it is in fact one of the most lazy, contrived, shallow, and unconvincing setups I've seen in any movie, possibly ever.

I've no idea what the book is like, or if it's for impressionable 10-year-olds, but if the claims that the movie is exactly like it, as so many reviewers here have said, then I'm glad I didn't waste even longer wading through its swampy nonsense.

Terrible acting and directing, a knowing smirk on its face (convinced of its own cuteness) this is a dumb, shallow comedy that has little sense of place or purpose, no targets for its humour, and is way too smug for its own good. Two minutes in and you're confronted by the first of dozens of ridiculous inconsistencies: in a small town of a few thousand inhabitants and where the editor of the local print newspaper declares that circulation is down, they still employ a dedicated obituarist fWhat is this the New York Times?) though there's a death only every 10 days. See where this is going? How to make ends meet? If only people died more often? It's all downhill from here.

As movies about serial killers being hunted by cops goes, this one is pretty good for about the first two-thirds. Denzel Washington plays a demoted detective now reduced to the humdrum life of a small-town sheriff because of his obsession in a previous homicide investigation that ruined his life, his career and his marriage. Rami Malek plays the younger, more impulsive but equally obsessive, cop who has replaced him in the precinct and the unlikely pair become an unlikely friendship, investigating a new and the cold case murders in tandem. So far so good. Even the fact that they know or feel they know who the serial killer is less than halfway through the movie doesn't entirely kill it in its tracks because, as so often in these things, the serial killer is a psychotic who seems to get off on the fact that his identity is known to the two cops and the cat-and-mouse game that ensues is a kind of an entertainment to him as it is also a torment to them. Where everything completely falls asunder, however, is where the younger cop accepts an invitation from the killer, completely out of the blue, to drive out into what looks like the desert in the middle of the night to dig up one of the bodies. Why the killer would do this? Who knows? Perhaps it's a mark of just how crazy and psychotic he really is. But why the cop, on his own, while his buddy is off in a shop buying batteries, would go with him and leave himself in a position where he might be killed or might have to kill? It makes absolutely zero sense and reduces what was a relatively promising, if somewhat old-fashioned, buddy detective movie to something completely unforgettable, but for all the wrong reasons.

As movies about serial killers being hunted by cops go, this one is pretty good for about the first two-thirds or thereabouts. Denzel Washington plays a demoted detective now reduced to the humdrum life of a small-town sheriff because of his obsession in a previous homicide investigation that ruined his life, his career and his marriage. Rami Malek plays the younger, more impulsive but equally obsessive cop who has replaced him in the precinct; and the pair develop (guess what?) an unlikely friendship, investigating a new and the historic case murders in tandem.

So far so half-decent. Even the fact that they know or feel they know who the serial killer is less than halfway through the movie doesn't entirely kill it in its tracks because, as so often in these things, the serial killer is a psychotic who seems to get off on the fact that his identity is known to the two cops; and the cat-and-mouse game that ensues is a kind of an entertainment to him, and us (desperately suspending disbelief) as it is also a torment to them.

Where everything completely falls asunder, however, is where the younger cop accepts an invitation from the killer, completely out of the blue, to drive out into what looks like the desert in the middle of the night to dig up one of the murder victims. Why the killer would do this, who knows? (After all, as the script keeps telling us, they have nothing on him.) Perhaps it's a mark of just how crazy and psychotic he really is. Oh well.

But why the young cop, on his own, while his buddy is off in a shop buying batteries, would go with the killer, in the killer's car, and leave himself in a position where he might be killed or, as bad, might have to kill? It makes zero sense and reduces what was a relatively passable, if somewhat old-fashioned, buddy movie to something completely unforgettable - but for all the wrong reasons.

Terrible writing, dumb and derivative plot and a waste of at least one great actor (I'll leave you to guess while you thank me for saving you two wasted hours of your life).

In a world of near identical whodunnits and psychological crime shows, this one stands out above so many. A stunningly good performance from the young female lead (Alexandra Karlsson Tyrefors, a star on the rise) whose life is broken then somehow patched together again after a rape in her teenage years makes for a truly compelling perspective on hurt and resilience. The supporting actors (particularly her father, but also her mother and her boyfriend) are terrific too - nuanced, subtle performances that add up to much more than the plot on its own conveys.

Fantastic cinematography, editing, and, most important, script add up to one of the best miniseries in the genre in recent years.

The few good things about this movie - that is, the deadpan, laid-back but meticulous voice-over of the narrator, describing, with almost scientific exactitude, his plans, attitudes, conclusions, and his utter lack of doubt about the efficiency of his method, are lifted straight from the movie Ghost Dog.

Everything half interesting about this POV tale of an assassin with a philosophical bent, an assassin who has to correct an imbalance in his psychic universe, an assassin that proceeds through and over the obstacles ahead of him as if they didn't exist, and with the same disregard for the lives of others as for the safety of himself, all of it is taken directly from Ghost Dog and Forrest Whitaker's coldly, calculatedly, eerily calm and efficient performance. The one thing that is revolutionarily new is the ending and, well, it's garbage.

Then again, if you're going to listen to Morrissey and the Smiths endlessly from one end of the film to the other, as does the protagonist here, then maybe the Assassin's Life seems like a good option.

Terrible movie. Avoid.

Utterly trite, shallow, uninvolving and almost totally incoherent Korean movie taking its cue from the worst Harrison Ford / Liam Neeson spouse-murder-chase movies, a formula so bad that no one thought it could be further dis-improved by adding the conceit of frankly ludicrous parallel time zones, bad guys that are so obvious from their first appearance on the screen that you'd wonder why the police don't live outside their homes, and, as if the formula wasn't bad enough, a chase through a lantern-filled street carnival and the obligatory cutesy love scene between the (in this case dead) wife and the (haunted) husband trying to avenge her death. All together in a blender of bad weather and cliched showdowns, this adds up to a complete mess of badly directed, badly performed derivative garbage. An embarrassment from start to lament finish.

What Remains is one of the very best thriller mini series that's been made by anybody (and I've watch a lot). The real star, one might say, is the house in which the characters live, a once fine home for gentry, perhaps, now a somewhat down-at-heel community of flat-dwellers, including a separated husband and his teenage son, a grumpy ageing maths teacher who lives in the basement, two lesbians whose fraught relationship seeps like a poison through the floors, the new couple who've just moved in (the girl in the last months of pregnancy) and the dead girl whose badly decayed body is discovered in the attic (suggesting a crime as far back as two or three years ago), kick-starting an investigation which shows all of the residents up in the worst possible light.

The claustrophobic and run-down atmosphere of the house is brilliantly conveyed and worth watch in its own; the acting is near faultless throughout;, the dialogue is brilliant, economical and razor-sharp; and the role and performance of the investigating detective who gets dangerously drawn in to the mystery is a real tour de force performance by David Trelfell, though it's unfair perhaps to single him out when the whole ensemble produce the goods and so much more.

Not an easy watch, and darker than Unforgotten, for instance, for whom it seems a direct precursor and influence, What Remains is a stand-out achievement a cluttered genre. That it does as much as it does, complete with a whole sequence of twists and turns and 'gasp out loud' moments in only 4 hour-long episodes is a minor miracle.

Puts almost everything else in the genre to shame.

What an utter waste of time and of an amusing, even promising first ten minutes or so. A couple buy a house which has an unexplained duct (think tunnel entrance) in the basement, descending through which, they discover, brings them inexplicably back to the upper floor of the house but, more importantly and mysteriously, also appears to move them forward in time by 12 hours and makes them get younger by three days. So far so pretty good (it is a fantasy, after all; no scientists were harmed or consulted in the making of this movie.) The setup is an amusing enough modern take on a familiar fairytale conceit of ageing and desire, with all the promise and threat of that genre.

Thereafter, however, the director and writer might as well take off in the abandoned car we see early on in the garden of the house (one of perhaps a dozen loose ends) and drive away at speed, leaving the hapless actors struggling to do anything at all with the mess that used to be a story.

That The Guardian chose this as one of its 50 movies of 2023 is reason enough for regular drug tests of the editorial staff of a once-relevant and more or less reliable paper.

Avoid this? Bien sur.

The title of this review says it all. After establishing its credentials with some terrific wide-angle views of Venice (a refreshing introduction to the strange otherworld of the story) the rest of this production is utter disposable garbage with a ridiculously flat and one-dimensional script, horrible embarrassed performances from a variety of A-list international actors (one coming out of this worse and less convincing than the next) and a plot that makes Scooby Do look like a contender for the Nobel Prize. Agatha Christie movies are always a bit hit and miss, the conventions of her time seeming quaint and unconvincing in ours. But this production spits on her grave while pretending to honour her memory. Offensively stupid. Avoid.

Accused has good production values, mostly good acting and a premise that is certainly engaging, particularly in our media-riven and divided times. But at 1 hour and 27 minutes long, it's an hour longer than it should be. In truth what we have here really is just a one-act play stretched out into a full-length film with a beginning and to some extent an end but a middle in which almost nothing happens and the male lead, mistaken for a London train bomber, is left abandoned to run around on stage in a panic or to hold his breath (or pant and gasp etc etc) while waiting for the inevitable wave of hostile keyboard warrior to wash over him. People do get mistaken for terrorists, of course, and that's the premise that will bring many people to this film but unfortunately, they will learn very little of what it's really like, not least because, ridiculously, not one person this upstanding, employed citizen knows or calls a friend ever rings him when the news breaks - as if interconnectivity, the horror of the piece, only went one way. In short, a waste of a good idea and a waste of time.

For a movie that started off with an intriguing prospect, a almost subtle new perspective on the border tensions between Mexico and South Texas, No Man's Land quickly stumbled into telenovela territory with a beautiful Mexican rancher appearing even to confuse the lead actor and make him forget he was in the run for murder, entirely threatening to overpower what had up to then been a script about crime and redemption. The final scenes, not to spoil it, are so hysterically over-the-top (and badly acted and directed) that the movie is almost comical. An unintentional echo of that great 70s comedy, Evil Roy Slade. In a word: Avoid.

Despite an excellent lead, Kleo simply falls apart. Sure, it's Fun, but not very. Violent, and very. But most of all, it's disjointed, bordering on random, awkwardly stumbling from one tonal mood to another. And, despite its often dominating soundtrack, it's massively troubled by a lack of rhythm. Kleo comes across, as others have said, as a mix between Killing Eve and some more standard spy thriller. The locations are stunning and so evocative of a time only a few decades ago, but almost unbelievably distant to a Western European experience. There's drama and humour, But the show's problem is, it never manages to pass through the Brandenburg Gate from one to the other and ends up stuck halfway forever between the two.

God's Crooked Lines started off as an entertaining, if less than original, film investigating a murder in a remote psychiatric hospital. This time the location is high in the mountains of Catalonia and the attractive new female patient who is committed to the asylum by her husband is, or appears to believe she is, in secret a detective investigating a recent murder in the same institution. So far so good, or if not good, at least entertaining. We've all seen many of these asylum films before and what this one lacks in originality it makes up for in a fantastically moody building and general location. Hereafter, however, the whole thing quickly comes unraveled. The characters are implausible. The director of the institution with whom the detective believes she has corresponded in advance and who she thinks is in on the deception suddenly abandons her when the going gets tough and now she is not just playing a psychiatric patient but is condemned to being one. All this seems and is far too familiar but the fact that the acting is so poor and the script risible makes this, at 2 hours and 35 minutes, a kind of incarceration in itself.

The high score reviews here must be based in viewings of this film in the very distant past. Because, despite its reputation as a buddy movie that reveals the workings, fears and desires of four teenage male friends, on a long journey to find and report finding a dead body, this mawkishly dull and emotionally flat four-gander features only bland acting, cringey dialogue and depth-of-character more often found in Disney movies relegated to Sunday afternoon viewing. I hate to rain in anyone's parade, or to diss anyone's find memories, but I didn't remember this as being even partly worth of all the hype when I first saw it in the late 80s and, we'll, time has not been kind to it. There's maybe five minutes of fascination in recognising the 'stellar' cast as only kids, but in truth none of them comes of of it too well. Blindfolded or reduced to a half-hour slot it would be impossible to distinguish this from an episode of The Wonder Years or some other moral-dripping slice of small-town nostalgia. 'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.'

I'm normally a fan of slow, detailed stories in which place and nuance do the work of moving the story forward and silence amplifies the thoughts and utterances of the characters. The problem here is that the characters are still so thinly drawn and the pacing builds only towards what seems like inevitably violence rather than organic revelation. At times it doesn't feel much more real or better realised than some Dirty Harry type tale where the furious cop stumbles and storms ever onwards, with nothing really developing his story or making him into other than a two-dimensional character. Instead of being affecting or engaging this feels, despite the twin narratives of filial loss and domestic abuse, utterly unengaging.

If ever there was a show where the achievements of the cinematographer outshone those of the writer, director and cast, this is it. True, the camera crew have Venice to work with, and Venice (as so many filmmakers have found) is a character in itself: all you've got to do is pay attention to its details and idiosyncrasies. Even so, the camera work and editing here is remarkable good, full of curiosity and maybe even love for the location.

The script, however, is a total plodder, more leaking dinghy than gondola. Mysterious girl returns to hometown after decades away, now cast as the avenging angel for kids being abused and sold online. Tough work, for sure, but it's treated here as almost backdrop to the mawkish romantic plot elements in which our heroine (improbably partnered with her old boyfriend who wasn't even a cop but a musician last time they met!) is an Italian kickass ninja with great hair rather than a real person moved by the plight of those she has devoted her life to saving, i.e. Abused kids. (I tack them on to the end of the sentence here the way the plot tacks them on to this otherwise entirely average romance cop show in a cool location.)

So often, Italian dramas (with some honourable exceptions) add mush and Muzak where muscle and motivation would be much more welcome and effective. This is one of those shows where the splendor of the backdrop makes the main attraction (if we can use such a term of the theme) look like nothing to get worked up about - hardly what you want in a show on such a subject.

You'll learn nothing about how pedophiles really work (except that it has to do with the Dark Web, apparently) and you'll think Venice looks great if a bit damp off season. Other than that you'll see some nice clothes and some handsome people pretending to be serious and getting in and out of boats of various kinds.

Sadly, three episodes were more than enough.

A 'mainstream' comedy tv shore with Asian actors is long overdue, especially one that doesn't bend over backwards to show its credentials but accepts the characters for who they are rather than for what their appearance in a tv show means to contemporary America.

So far, so good. The only problem with Beef is, well, almost everything else. The story is dull and utterly linear (it takes more than turning up the volume on the petty acts of revenge between the two central characters to produce drama: haven't the writers/director ever heard of Aristotle and his principles of drama which have stood the test of time in drama, film, theatre and TV for, well, 3000 years or so.

Uh uh back and forth and back again the viewer's head goes as if watching a tennis match where no real points are score and even the baldly signed 'cliffhangers' at the end of episodes fail to ratchet up the drama or the excitement.

The music doesn't help, twee Tv Muzak that has all the depth or charm of an advertising jingle. And the acting is no 'knowing' and self-satisfied (comedy needs edge, risk, darkness) that, with the lame sexual jokes this could be for a kindergarten audience.

Folks, it's a dud. But at least the good news is that there's still a chance for someone to make a mainstream show that inside all white gals and dudes picking up and dropping off their perfect-teeth kids to ballet while the token non-white families try not to look shocked that they got a place in the script at all.

For all the hype and expectation, there's nothing new in Beef. It's just the same old recipe with a few less familiar ingredients. It's sure as hell not the show America needs at a time when race relations and understanding are at a lower ebb than at any time since the Japanese were rounded up and put in camps during WWII.

This starts out so promising, then, slowly (because everything about this movie is slow) it collapses on the weight of its own significance.

A couple, he from the UK, she from the States, relocate to 1980s London, hoping to make a killing in the new international climate of the banking world. He's a dreamer, she follows, and their two teenage kids get dragged along, mostly without complaint.

But there something off about him. He's to confident, too glib, too sure of his success. We sense there's something wrong. That behind the mask some darkness will be revealed. And it is, and it isn't.

And therein lies the problem with this play - for it's really just one act play, rather than a fully fledged three act movie. Because, moving in to a giant abandoned mansion house in the sorry countryside, the strains on this family unit soon start to show, being mostly of the financial variety. And quickly we realise our hero, ably played by Jude Law, is not so much a confidence trickster as the victim of his own overconfidence. The marriage is in trouble, this whole idylic world is about to collapse.

And in short it does. But the way the movie doesn't, choosing the ham-fisted symbolism of the wife's dying horse to allude to the dying dream of their relocation, it's just so badly done that it leaves no more room in the story for the viewer to believe or indeed to care for these characters.

Disappointingly, the slow, tentative revelations of the first half of the movie - like a kind of genteel strip shop - proved to reveal nothing more than a clichéd plot in which each character is brought to the brink and then at the end comes back to themselves and to each other - quite literally just in time for tea.