Andrew scott

1984 on Audible is a deliciously chilling immersion experience

Forty years on from the year in which it is set, and released on the date of Winston Smith’s first diary entry, George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (not 1984, despite how this most recent retelling has chosen to style the title) has received perhaps its highest-profile adaptation since Michael Radford’s film. Andrew Garfield plays the reluctantly rebellious Winston, and man-of-the-moment Andrew Scott is a smoothly vicious O’Brien. Cynthia Erivo makes for a suitably feisty Julia, and Tom Hardy reprises his Bane boom as Big Brother, although his contributions are wisely kept to a minimum.

george orwell nineteen eighty-four audible

Ripley is not the edge-of-seat thriller you expect

At a time when most streaming shows front-load their first episode with all the drama, intrigue and titillation so that the audience will keep on watching, the opening of Steven Zaillian’s Ripley is almost comically counterintuitive. We see Andrew Scott’s Tom Ripley lugging a corpse down a flight of stairs, without explanation as to who he is or who his victim is, and then we begin the series proper, filmed (by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswitt) in crisp black and white. Over the course of eight episodes, Zaillian follows Highsmith’s first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, reasonably closely, albeit with ornamentations and digressions. But if you had any expectation that this would be an edge-of-seat thriller, well, think again.

ripley