For all its ruminative merits, Richard Vergette's drama is not the “searing political thriller” it purports to be. It raises lots of interesting questions, but they get in the way of any deep emotive power.
Although tinged throughout with blue, the Norwegian drama King of Devil’s Island is so grim it might as well be grey. Basing it on real events pitches the film as a cautionary tale, but the message is hard to determine. Everything shies away from explanation. Norwegians might have the context, but the rest of us need to fill in the gaps.
Into the Abyss sees celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog take a sharp turn away from those marvels of early man he so magnificently captured in the stereoscopic Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the shocking violence of which humanity is also capable, here both greed-fuelled and state-sanctioned. It’s a documentary which takes as its focus a multiple homicide and is both an anatomy of a (triple) murder and a passionate, if frequently askew, petition against the death penalty.
“A place of human bondage, a place of human suffering,” was how Hank Skinner described the Texas prison where he’s spent the 17 years. On death row, he's convicted of triple murder. The subject of the disquieting first entry in Werner Herzog’s series on condemned prisoners, Skinner was sanguine in the face of death but pursuing every means to prolong its arrival.
Prisoners’ Wives belongs in a hoary tradition of television drama which finds women doing it for themselves. The men are always otherwise engaged, being either dead or useless or, in the case of Prisoners’ Wives, as it implies on the tin. In the old days such dramas were usually written by one of Lucy Gannon or Lynda La Plante or Kay Mellor, but here the broad brushstrokes are applied by Julie Gearey.
I had been planning to speculate about what might happen in the finale of Public Enemies, but its three-night run was shifted back a day to accommmodate a Panorama special about the Stephen Lawrence case.
A nine-year-old girl testifies in court. She’s clear, precise and damning. The case revolves around her testimony alone. All the accused – 10 of them, her family and neighbours - are declared guilty and executed. The girl is the only one of the family left alive. Thirty-two years later, the girl faces the same charges. Tried, she’s found guilty but the case goes to appeal. The girl was Jennet Device and the charge was witchcraft. This extraordinary, atmospheric and beautiful documentary told her story, the story of The Pendle Witch Child, the implications of the case and how it resonated.
A mean, muscular and unflinching display of concentrated brutality and shaved-down storytelling, the Spanish thriller Cell 211 is armed with the furious intensity of its caged environment and a chain of events which cascades like dominos over and beyond its prison walls. It’s an unlikely candidate for award-season acclaim, but Daniel Monzόn's film cheeringly arrives laden with Goyas - as if Spain’s strongest man had triumphed at a beauty pageant.
Someone had moved in next door to the Palins. There was a camera shot of him, his face pixellated out. Apparently he was writing an exposé of the lady of the house. “I think it’s an invasion of our privacy and I don’t like it,” chirrupped Sarah Palin in that fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice of hers. “How would you feel if some dude who you knew was out to get you moved in 15 feet away from your kids?” I suspect I’d probably do something sane and rational like invite a camera crew into my home and make an access-all-areas reality TV series.
What a slap in the face for the human predicament that an opera which, for all its faultlines, should carve "love and courage will set you free" on every heart meets with barely a moment of truth in Jürgen Flimm's production. It's the second Covent Garden revival in a month to give no sense of people or place, and like the McVicar Aida, it should have been put quietly to sleep after its first run. "But Nina Stemme will be wonderful," they all said. Don't bank on it; just be thankful that the soprano's Leonore and, perhaps more impressively, Endrik Wottrich as the imprisoned husband she saves are up to the vocal challenges.
What a slap in the face for the human predicament that an opera which, for all its faultlines, should carve "love and courage will set you free" on every heart meets with barely a moment of truth in Jürgen Flimm's production. It's the second Covent Garden revival in a month to give no sense of people or place, and like the McVicar Aida, it should have been put quietly to sleep after its first run. "But Nina Stemme will be wonderful," they all said. Don't bank on it; just be thankful that the soprano's Leonore and, perhaps more impressively, Endrik Wottrich as the imprisoned husband she saves are up to the vocal challenges.