The White Lotus (Season 3)

I have been heard to say White Lotus Season 2, the one set in Italy with its Shakespearean treatment of themes like trust, commitment, sex, and gender relations, is the best tv I have ever watched, so what a disappointment Season 3 proved to be with its stagnant storylines, repetitive scenes (Greg staring ominously over a brandy glass over and over and over; the dad popping pills over and over and over; everyone in a resort with nothing to do and nothing motivating them, left to go to the pool, then a different pool, then a bar, then a different bar...), and the dreariest storyline of all, that security guard walking to and from his gatehouse in dull conversation with his love interest, the girl hellbent on him climbing the ladder to mega success as a security guard, and the most dismaying thing of all was this season's more tenuous than ever - perhaps completely missing - link to place, because while Season One and especially Season Two were indelibly connected to their settings of Hawaii and Sicily respectively, moribund Season Three could have been set anywhere at all. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Agatha Christie's Seven Dials (2026)

Agatha Christie wasn't called the Queen of Mystery for her occasional attempts at the espionage thriller, as any reader of The Big Four, They Came to Baghdad, and Passenger to Frankfurt can attest, and so, except for a ridiculously embellished final reveal, we can't entirely blame the makers of this three-part series for the ludicrous plotting of their adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery, a comic adventure after Nancy Drew rather than a traditional murder mystery, about British government agents, scientists, spies, absurd secret societies, and, when you dissect it, a circular story of unlikely coincidence rather than sensible clues.

★★★☆☆

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The Child In Time (2017)

Ian McEwan's book, when I read it, was a gnarly knot of plots held together not by sense nor a desire to entertain a reader but seemingly by a want to be clever about the theme of childhood and Time, and certainly some of the threads of his book - a child lost in a moment, a successful first time writer whose bestseller is mistaken for a children's book, a friend who is reverting to childhood, and a government enacting policy regarding child literacy - are interesting, most included here, but even in this adaptation, the tone is heavy, droll, haughty, and like the book, the movie is smug, joyless and left me wondering whether the point is simply recognising the author's smarts.

★★☆☆☆

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The Perfect Couple

Each episode of this D-grade 'White Lotus' opens on an exuberant flash mob-style wedding dance featuring all the stars - Nicole Kidman, Liev Schrieber, and a gaggle of botoxed others - wiggling their hips and waving their arms and laughing for about twenty seconds or so as the brief opening credits roll, and that's honestly it for the energy which depletes to zero immediately as the episodes start, leaving audiences to groan through a six-episode mystery of leaden acting, dialled-in performances, cookie-cut characters with zero personality or weight, extraneous others who need not feature at all, plus glib attempts at writing that toys with but won't tackle big White Lotus themes...and it doesn't help that the plot is so often simply hard to believe, and the pacing glacial. 

★★☆☆☆,

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From (Season 1 and half of Season 2)

LOST didn't dig itself into its hole this quickly and its set-up allowed its characters quiet, contemplation, and the ability to tend gardens and read literature under the shade of a plane fuselage on the beach and so generally characters had time to give thought to the inexplicable things happening around them, but From characters have just the short period of daylight hours in which to scream at each other about those inexplicable things (the night creatures and impossible tree tunnels, nightmarish visions and holes in basements), making "From" a shouty, distressing LOST experience, one more cheaply made than LOST, with characters certainly not as charismatic or likeable, with worse writing and patchier - not excellent - acting, so it's a tv series that often comes across, given the inescapable religiosity of it's story, as a badly thrown together church community announcement.

★★★☆☆ (so far/subject to change/probably down)

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Big Brother Australia Season 14

The "It's A Knockout" games of Channel 7's Season 14 of Big Brother, sometimes a feature twice per episode, only rob viewers of the opportunity to get to better know the housemates, surely smart, interesting people with interesting lives they might like to share were they able to down ping-pong balls for a minute to talk, but they appear as automatons locked not just in a Sydney Olympic Park pavillion but also into a relentless and uninteresting cycle of game / nomination / scramble / heartfelt speeches about honour, head-moves and heart-moves / tears / game again / and repeat) all against a monotonous colour palette of hot pink and blue.

★☆☆☆☆

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Crowhaven Farm (1970)

In this 1970 made-for-tv horror, an unhappily married couple moves into the country estate she has inherited but far from benefitting their marriage as they had hoped, the move results in her having visions of distant-past witch trials and encountering other weirdness in her present day - but by far the most horrible thing in this mild tv distraction is not witches but an irksome subplot involving the couple's ten-year-old foster daughter.

★★☆☆☆

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Maigret's Night At The Crossroads (2017)

Perhaps Rowan Atkinson was trying here to present an especially sad Maigret given the story opens upon the funeral of a police colleague, but he is so flat, so deadpan, so morose - even more so than usual - that this episode of the usually thrilling 2016 and 2017 Maigret series is the rather flat and ponderous one of the four - at some points you wonder if the actors are speaking as slowly as they are just to try to stretch the story to movie-length and this lethargic pacing is at odds with the outlandish characters, one of them scarred and hissing like a Bond villain and another a stammering cartoon who do not fit well against the backdrop of gritty Paris and its mid-50s period detail.

★★☆☆☆

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True Detective (Season 3)

This third season follows that peculiar formula that defines TD: the first four episodes are boring and then a violent gun battle kills scores of people and the series shifts gears, rocketing to an exciting finish in which grisly crimes involving sex rings are solved - but Season Three changes things up a little with the pace remaining fairly ponderous even after the mid-season gun battle - only natural given this time the plot centres on an aged detective with memory problems.

★★☆☆☆

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True Detective (Season 2)

True Detective Season 2 (DVD

True Detective Season 2 (DVD)

Season 2 centres around the murder of a city planner in California and confirms True Detective as an anthology series about twisted murders committed by masked culprits, investigated by deeply flawed police officers - here, three, all deeply, deeply cracked - who engage in a massive shootout in about episode 5, and like the first season, this one is star-studded (Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn star), is cinematic, but is let down by the ponderousness of its first four episodes, by its overreaching scope (cults and gay shame and extramarital affairs and adoption and sexual harrassment counselling sessions are just some of the extraneous matters that keep things mindbogglingly busy) and it is also let down by the pure (daytime) soapiness of scenes between Vince Vaughn's Frank, a club owner up to his neck in corruption and crime, and his wife, Jordan, his business partner and wannabe-bearer of his child.

★★★☆☆

True Detective (Season 1)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

Two cops, Matthew McConaughey's Rustin "Rusty" Cohle and Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart investigate the ritualistic killing of a prostitute in this gritty eight-episode police procedural that distinguishes itself with its bleak view of human psychology - as bleak as any of its Louisiana backwater crime scenes - and with the false promise of its title: that this has anything to do with pulpy True Detective-style magazines or tells a crime story that is even slightly realistic. 

★★★★☆

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I Am Elizabeth Smart (2017)

Competently acted with Skeet Ulrich in the role of Brian David Mitchell (the man who kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and who over nine months subjected her to rape and torture in the Utah wilderness), this made-for-tv movie is essentially a survivor impact statement with Smart herself appearing between scenes to narrate her oft-revisited real life crime story but this time from her now adult perspective as a mother, wife and activist against predatory crimes. 

★★☆☆☆

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Maigret In Montemartre (2017)

One of two movie-length episodes in the 2017 second season of the Rowan Atkinson-helmed adaptations of Georges Simenon's Maigret stories, this one, based on 'Maigret And The Strangled Stripper', is another rivetting crime melodrama set in a terrifically realised gritty 1950s Paris full of morphine-addled prostitutes, rent boys, showgirls and grubby bohemes, and I think it again terrifically captures the feel of Simenon's spare writing and I think Rowan Atkinson is Maigret leapt-to-life from Simenon's pages. 

★★★★☆

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Miss Marple: 4.50 To Paddington (1987)

I like these BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, including this particular one based on What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw, because I like the opening credit titlecards and the jaunty Antiques Roadshow music that kicks in every time a body or scandal or an excuse to have a cup of tea turns up, and I especially like the 80-something Joan Hickson's Miss Marple, THE Miss Marple in my mind, who here enlists a young friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe Manor to investigate a claim that a woman was strangled on a nearby train.

★★★☆☆

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Catching the Black Widow (2017)

The spin of this dramatisation of a real life crime story, a case I'd never heard of but one which apparently rivetted New Zealand as it played out in court in 2013, is that a selfless Erin Brockovich-style crusader, Lee-Anne Cartier, overcame family problems, financial troubles and disinterested police to expose her brother's wife as his killer, but given the perfectly plain fact that the wife, Helen Milner, is a murderous weirdo who compulsively - and stupidly - lies (and not just about the details of her husband's death) and given she was at the time being investigated about other crimes including a $30,000 theft, was considered a loon by work colleagues and was seeking to claim $250,000 from her victim's life insurance policy, it is hard to believe Cartier's efforts beyond her initial questioning of a suicide ruling were necessary, which might just be a problem in the telling of the story, but either way, rightly or wrongly, this $2 million production is a dry affair and feels like an attempt to present slow-moving and routine NZ police matters as something more 'Hollywood'. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Maigret's Dead Man (2016)

It's not French and Rowan Atkinson isn't being funny but once you've got your head around these immediate incongruities, the 2016 series of Maigret tv movies is terrific viewing - fans of the Georges Simenon books and fans of tv murder mysteries in general will find the episodes as thrilling as they are taut (like the wee slips of the books, there is not a wasted word or moment) and the plots are deliciously grim, as is evident in this episode which features a death count of at least twenty - three remote farm massacres are somehow linked to the death of a man outside a cafe in the Place de la Concorde.

★★★★☆

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Broadchurch (Series 1)

A town of insomniacs is rocked by the discovery of a young boy's body on a beach and it falls to the newly appointed D.I., a sickly Scot with a cross to bear, and his second-in-command, an inexperienced local policewoman, to determine who among the nocturnal townsfolk is the killer, in this mostly gripping mystery - well, for the first six of the eight episodes - which plays out like a movielength episode of, say, Midsomer Murders stretched to eight tv episodes by way of innumerous slow motion walking scenes and lingering shots of the town's distinctive cliffs and beaches.

★★★☆☆

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The Witness For The Prosecution (2016)

Fans of the 1957 film starring Charles Laughton, which was thrilling and funny, will be wary of the changes made to Agatha Christie's plot in this grim 2016 BBC TV miniseries (for example the inclusion of two grubby sex scenes, the absence of Laughton's cantakerous, cigar-chomping Sir Wilfrid Robarts who is replaced by Toby Jones's poor, unhappily married solicitor with a tragic backstory, not to mention a very unexpected second trial for the murder of Kim Cattral's Emily French), but as things proceed it becomes clear these deviations are not simply changes for the sake of change - this is not an update but a tv miniseries adaptation and purists will come to appreciate and will be kept on their toes by the clever embellishments.

★★★★☆

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フリーター、家を買う

There's humour, intrigue, tugs at the heartstrings, J-pop, and the likeable Kazunari Ninomiya from boy band Arashi making this a hugely entertaining family drama about a young man who abandons his "salaryman" aspirations for life as a furi-ta- (a person who lacks gainful, secure full-time employment) but when his mother falls ill, his father becomes distant, and their house comes under threat, the 'freeter' sets upon a plan to buy the family home despite his job troubles.

★★★★★

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Dance Moms

Whether it is a true depiction of the lives of a group of women and their daughters or a lot of scripted nonsense concocted for the camera, this show about a dance school represents an insidious form of child abuse: that ratified by tv networks, producers, by the awful dance studio teacher living what is surely not her best life, by the revolting mums who stand around calling each other 'whore' and 'bitch'  within earshot of their children, and by the fans of the show in their homes who remotely, anonymously luxuriate like internet trolls in the bullying, sexualisation and all-over mindfucking of young girls made to wear, instead of gym sweats, glittery two-piece dancing costumes while twerking on command for adults to music which, in the episode I watched, included the lyrics over and over, "I'm a sexy girl".

☆☆☆☆☆

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