Netflix

Tuesday

Zoe Strimpel

The Netflix generation has lost its grip on history

The first thing you notice about Bridgerton, Netflix’s big winter blockbuster set in Regency England, is how bad it is: an expensive assemblage of clichés that smacks of the American’s-eye view of Britain’s aristocratic past. The dialogue is execrable, the ladies’ pouts infuriating. But bad things can be good, especially when it comes to sexy period romps. Bridgerton is no different. The story follows the elder children of the Bridgerton family as they look for love in a utopian sprawl of courtly landscape and sociality. Based on Julia Quinn’s best-selling novel and adapted for Netflix by Shonda Rhimes (writer and producer of multi-season binge classic Gray’s Anatomy), the invitation to let

Monday

Julie Bindel

Why feminists should watch serial killer dramas

I connect to Netflix for yet another evening of no-choice entertainment. Well, I suppose I could take a turn around the room, mulling over the local gossip before playing a few notes on a musical instrument. But wait, there is NO gossip under this relentless lockdown, and I don’t have a musical instrument. So, as someone who is proud of my prolific TV habit I scroll through the crime section, and can’t help but notice the saturation of serial killer themed documentaries and dramas on offer. Night Stalker, Serial Killer with Piers Morgan, Confessions of a Serial Killer, Inside the Criminal mind, Mrs Serial Killer, Psychopath, Mindhunter, Evil Genius, Killer

Tuesday

John Sturgis

The Netflix sommelier: what to drink while you watch

Are we there yet? No, not a child on a long drive (remember those?) but me every day of last week as I struggled to stay strong towards the closing stages of Dry January. Yes – finally we are there: the sunlit uplands of 1 February. Having spent the best part of a month dry, it’s fair to say I have done a good amount of reflection on the subject of alcohol and abstention thereof. No, not about how awful I’ve realised drinking is and how I now plan to stop drinking forever – none of that nonsense. I was thinking more about how it’s made me realise once again quite how

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Remarkably moving: The Dig reviewed

Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. It was an immense buried boat, dating from the 7th century, and it yielded gilded treasure after gilded treasure, thereby wholly changing our understanding of the Dark Ages. ‘They weren’t dark… by Jupiter!’ as one archaeologist puts it here. It is a fascinating story that could have been told as a full-on thriller. But instead the film employs a delicious, graceful restraint, paying as much attention to deeply buried feeling as to what’s buried deeply in the earth. It’s remarkably moving. By Jupiter, I even cried by the

Friday

Annabel Denham

The BBC needs to face up to the truth about the licence fee’s future

It won’t come as much of a surprise to learn that the National Audit Office thinks the BBC faces ‘significant’ uncertainty over its financial future due to changes in viewing habits. The NAO’s findings are about as ground-breaking as your average anodyne Beeb drama, but they do tighten the cilice on a funding model that is impossibly outdated in the 21st century.  In the past decade alone, there has been a 30 per cent decline in BBC TV viewing; on average, the amount of time an adult spent watching broadcast BBC TV fell from 80 minutes per day in 2010 to 56 minutes in 2019. When it comes to younger

Thursday

Deborah Ross

So good I watched it twice: Netflix’s The White Tiger reviewed

The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, 99 Homes) who also wrote the screenplay. It stars Adarsh Gourav, otherwise a songwriter and singer. It’s a rags-to-riches story set in India but it’s not at all a typical rags-to-riches story set in India. Those are some of the things you probably should know, but there is only one thing I want you to know: it is wonderful and, even though the subject matter is often chilling, and there’s simmering rage, and murder, it’s still two hours of boisterous, dazzling, swaggering fun. I watched it once

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The truth about the vaccine ‘postcode lottery’

‘Postcode lottery!’ people scream when one area feels less well treated than another in a public service — in this case, the rollout of the Covid vaccines. It is a silly phrase, if you believe in the devolution of power and the importance of locality. The point of local health trusts, councils and so on is to let local people run most of the things that matter to them. The logical result is that — even within a national set-up like the NHS — there will be differences. If there were no differences, it would not follow that everyone was getting the same high-quality service. It would much more likely

Wednesday

James Delingpole

Superb but depraved: BBC1’s The Serpent reviewed

The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net — but I still think it most unlikely that I shall stick it through to the final episode. It’s not the style that’s wrong but the subject matter: do we really want to spend eight hours of life in the company of a smug, ruthless serial killer who murders at least 12 people — and more or less gets away with it? Up to a point The Serpent has addressed this problem by trying to make the central figure not the killer, Charles Sobhraj, but the persistent Dutch junior diplomat, Herman

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

10 films to banish the January blues

At the best of times, January is a depressing month. Everyone is feeling poor and bloated after the Christmas extravaganza, and the days are still short and cold, with the nights drawing in far too early. Nobody has ever said ‘I’m really looking forward to January’. Which is why, with the spectre of illness and infection still stalking the land, the best thing that we can do is to stay at home with some of the most cheering films that we can find, and hope to banish the January blues that way. Of course, everyone enjoys a whacky comedy, or a gripping thriller, and they definitely have their place. But

Tuesday

Stephen Arnell

Ten films for New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve is bound to be less brash this year – some would ever say melancholic. Strangely many classic New Year movies tend to bend towards a sense of melancholy amid the celebrations, most memorably Billy Wilder’s classic comedy-drama The Apartment (1960). That film at least has a hopeful ending. Unlike say Sunset Boulevard (1950), Splendour in the Grass (1961), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Godfather Part II (1974) and especially Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Still, things perk up in more recent pictures set on New Year’s Eve; here’s a selection to see 2021 in with; some good, some so-so, and some, well…not so great: About Time (2013) –

Monday

Will Lloyd

The rise and fall of Netflix

In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, then CEO of Time Warner, was asked if he thought Netflix had any chance of taking over Hollywood. His sarcastic answer deserves to go down as one of the all-time dumb predictions. Bewkes (like the dude who wrote the internal Western Union memo that said telephones were a waste of time) was not taking Netflix seriously: ‘Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?’ A decade later, Netflix is not Albania. It’s imperial Spain during el Siglo de Oro. Massive, relentlessly mercantile and ruthlessly acquisitive, Netflix has rippled over the world to become one of the largest media businesses ever known. Count the hundreds

Thursday

James Delingpole

Netflix’s Barbarians taught me those Romans had it coming

Of all the times and places to have been on the wrong side of history, I can’t imagine many worse than to have been a Roman legionnaire in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 AD. It was the Romans’ Isandlwana — a devastating defeat inflicted by native forces on what was theoretically the world’s most sophisticated, best trained, and almost insuperable military power. Over the years since I first learned about arrogant, tricked, doomed Roman commander Varus and his three legions (about 20,000 men, almost none of whom got out alive), I’ve often mused pityingly on how it must have felt: trapped in the gloomy forest,

Thursday

Fiona Mountford

Sets appeal: the distracting beauty of TV backdrops

Never mind the regal and political tussles depicted in The Crown; the real action comes with the closing credits. This is the kind of list of job titles of which many feature films can only dream. In addition to the seven art directors of various ranks, there is an art department co-ordinator, art department assistant, five set decorators, two set decoration runners and a set decoration prop driver. Not to mention a drapes master, drapes master assistant, one florist and two home economists. You don’t get the stand-ins for Buckingham Palace, Balmoral and all the other stately piles of multiple turrets and crenelations looking as good as they do without

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The best heist films to watch

One of the first films ever produced, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, revolved around a robbery of a steam locomotive train, and ever since then the genre has continued to be one of the most enduring in cinema. It isn’t hard to see why. The core elements of the heist film are some of the most solidly pleasurable devices in big-screen entertainment. They often consist of the wily and charismatic veteran thief, putting together a crew for a ‘last job’; a love interest who is either unaware of his or her plans or an enthusiastic participant in them; a supporting cast of various degrees of eccentricity or unreliability; an implacable

Robert Jackman

Seven films to help you escape

With the November shutdown and talk of Christmas restrictions, you could be forgiven for wanting a good dose of escapism right now. If that’s you, here’s our guide to the best films to watch when you’re feeling fed up and want a break from it all: North by Northwest (1959) Preserved by the United States Congress as a film of cultural significance, Hitchcock’s 1959 spy caper has been dazzling moviegoers for much of the past century, currently holding an enviable 99 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And quite frankly, its praises have been sung more than enough. Having said that, it’s worth noting that this classic sparkles just

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Like a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show: Hillbilly Elegy reviewed

Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story. He was brought up in the American rust belt amid poverty, violence, addiction, trash heaps, burning cars, hopelessness and, on top of all that, a grandma who, we now know, was the spit of Catherine Tate’s Nan. (It’s Glenn Close, but check it out.) Still, if you can get past Nan — if, if — this film should be an emotionally stirring and moving account of, ultimately, achieving the American dream. (Vance went on to Yale and became a successful investment banker.) But as directed by Ron Howard it isn’t

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Did any of this actually happen? The Crown, season four, reviewed

‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the impending royal wedding between her nephew Charles and a pretty but gauche young thing called Lady Diana Spencer. Spoiler alert: none of the family will listen. Yes, The Crown is back on Netflix for its fourth season, and naturally I skipped straight to the episode that will be of most interest to everyone: the royal engagement and its aftermath. Why is this subject so grimly, pruriently, enduringly fascinating? Because even though it really did happen and many of us remember it vividly, it yet has the fantastical implausibility of the

Wednesday

Stephen Arnell

Ten underrated thrillers

As we are now well into the unwanted Lockdown sequel and winter approaches, time perhaps to enjoy an enforced home cinema experience with a selection of movie thrillers that you may have missed the first time round. Titles range from big budget star vehicles to smaller scale pictures that introduced us to some of the possible on and off-screen icons of tomorrow. The Coldest Game (2019) – Netflix I came across this Polish-produced Cold War thriller one night when searching for movies similar to Bridge of Spies (2015). Whilst not in the same league as Spielberg’s picture, The Coldest Game has enough twists and turns to engage the viewer, with

Robert Jackman

The best Scandi Noir to watch this winter

With the dark evenings rolling in and the headlines sounding gloomier than ever, what better way to enter winter than by getting stuck into a good Scandi noir? Once the preserve of late nights on BBC Four, the genre has become a bankable success for streaming services – and a source of friendly(ish) competition between the Nordic nations. Here are eight of the best recent offerings currently available on Netflix: Bordertown Brooding crime drama Bordertown has attracted praise from such luminaries as horror supremo Stephen King, as well as smashing viewing records in its native Finland. The plot follows a detective inspector, Kari Sorjonen, who relocates to a small town