What’s on this weekend? From Poldark to The Dead Don’t Die

Aidan Turner as Poldark

(Image credit: BBC)

By The Week Staff

last updated 12 July 2019

The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.

TELEVISION: Poldark

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“The final series of the period drama begins. Ross travels to London to answer a plea for help from an old friend, and finds himself faced with a conspiracy masterminded by a slave trader. There is so much maturity to this final chapter, written from scratch by Debbie Horsfield as she imagines what happened in the decade between books seven and eight. Everyone is older and wiser and has been marked by life and too much premature death.”

“The Dead Don’t Die is an actual zombie film about the American center - or, rather, dead center - set in the fictitious Pennsylvania town of Centerville, where the population is seven hundred and thirty-eight but soon turns out to fluctuate rapidly. Jarmusch’s film is an exuberantly imaginative comedy that’s also as fervently, vehemently, bitterly political as [Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana].”

“We meet our bookish millennial heroine — a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet, if you will. Nina — the thoroughly likable, introverted, whip-smart titular character in Abbi Waxman’s “The Bookish Life of Nina Hill” — would counter that her life is happily organized, not boring. Or okay, obsessively organized; semantics. She works at Knight’s, a charming bookshop based on the real-life Chevalier’s in Los Angeles...As in her previous novels, including 2018’s “Other People’s Houses,” Waxman’s wit and wry humor stand out. She is funny and imaginative, and “Bookish” lands a step above run-of-the-mill romantic comedy fare.”

“The Bridges of Madison County has all the components of a Harlequin Romance. There is a gorgeous farmer’s wife with a restless heart and shampoo-model hair. There are verdant vistas of the American Heartland. There is a tall dark stranger who has roamed the world but still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. There is an out-of-town husband, a loving but simple farmer whose idea of romance is a weekend in Des Moines. And there is lots of torrid sex, as the wife and the rugged stranger realize they cannot contain the forbidden passion that throbs within their breasts.”

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