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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

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

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

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,

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

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