An Adventure in Space and Time review: making history
Mark Gatiss treats the legends of Doctor Who’s creation as only a longtime fan can, in a lovely tribute full of the exasperated acceptance that rose-tinted hindsight brings.
made-for-tv
Student Services (Mes chères études) review: naked ambition
Well-acted but unsurprising, and far more sad than it is scandalous.
Everyday (review)
A remarkable and unlikely sort of love story, and another triumph from Michael Winterbottom…
William & Kate (review)
If you’re gonna do a WB-esque royal-wedding cash-in movie, you have to give it a fair shot. Where is the dream sequence? I fully expected to see Kate go all Buffy on some shuffling hoards of zombie paparazzi. But it’s nowhere to be found in William & Kate. How mysterious.
Alice (review)
More’s the pity that it ends up feeling pointless and empty and humorless, for it starts off rather intriguing, this modern update of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel…
Five Minutes of Heaven (review)
After a disastrous foray into Hollywood, German director Oliver Hirschbiegel returns to the realms of uneasy morality he explored in his portrait of Bunker Hitler in *Downfall*…
Torchwood: Children of Earth (review)
*Children of Earth* is haunting me, and I mean that literally, in a lying-awake-in-the-dark-of-night, staring-at-the-dark-ceiling, unable-to-sleep kind of way. Because my head is full of all the awful conundrums and evils and necessary evils this astonishing and magnificent story weaves.
Fanny Hill (review)
Oh, stop your tittering. All you know is that Fanny Hill is that naughty bawdy 18th-century novel that got its author, John Cleland, into so much trouble so long ago, and has since become a byword for the evils of censorship and the necessity of freedom of expression. But if you’re looking for something pornographic in this BBC adaptation of the novel, forget it, mister.
Recount (review)
I love having raw wounds ripped open, like the one that smarts every day when I see the smoking ruin that is America in 2008 and wonder, Geez, how different would things be if Al Gore had been president these last eight years?
Secret Smile (review)
If you love David Tennant and don’t want to have to take a toothbrush to your brain to excise images of him as a creep on orders of magnitude both deranged and criminal, then skip ‘Secret Smile.’
