Jack Seale

As Rappaport puts his flamboyant vision on the screen without compromise, The Artist can be somewhat exhausting, but he has assembled a dream cast and he knows how to stimulate them. .... It’s best to just knock back another absinthe and be grateful that, as a singular work of art, The Artist somehow exists.

It’s not a non-stop cavalcade of action: it regularly relents for extended, talky scenes concerning Creasy’s instability or Poe’s grief. Sometimes the combination is powerful. .... Man on Fire’s glowering intensity is, however, hard to take seriously.

Terrible things befall the women in this story; their consolation is that they told you they would, and they lived to tell the tale. It’s not enough.

It’s not helpful that the scripts are, predictably but not inevitably, not as funny as the parent show, so there’s nothing to offset the feeling of going round in circles. But eventually, the peril intensifies, the intrigue goes deeper.

Although Summerwater isn’t devoid of redemptive moments, and its effort not to stick to the template of crime mysteries powered by buried secrets is admirable, it ends up as a drama that makes you want to back out of the room slowly and carefully.

Secret Service’s rich mash of kitchen-reality motifs and cheesy espionage frippery does not, however, dent the emotional impact of Pete, tearful and grateful. .... And goddammit if the identity of the secret insider, the traitor now vindicated as a saviour, isn’t a gripping little mystery, too.

Your Friends isn’t supposed to be rigorous prestige drama. It’s a guilty pleasure, with a bit more heart than you might expect. It gets away with it.

The Capture’s dystopia is still one you can believe in.

A lot of folk who like dinosaurs know an awful lot about them, in a way that viewers who might casually tune in to a show about lemurs or dolphins probably do not. They might be frustrated by how little cutting-edge detail there is on each species and era, as the show pitches itself more towards families. The children of those families will, however, come away with a good grounding in evolution, and in what havoc can be wreaked by shifts in the climate.

The uneasy mix of medical drama and Holmes worship is set to continue. Perhaps it was unreasonable to hope a show in the Sherlock universe might tick off every other main character and ignore the man himself … but it was nice while it lasted.