The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: GLOW - season three
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“This season is markedly different in content rather than tone, while dialling up the camp and, more seriously, queer volume to Liberace levels in the move from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Overall, GLOW is now an issues-led ensemble piece. Relationships, race, the private calamity of being closeted, eating disorders, immigrant trauma, trying to conceive, working mothers’ guilt, and, always, sexism and misogyny, have become the focus instead of the backdrop…GLOW can still light up the room, and the heart, like no other series of its kind.”
On Netflix from August 9th
MOVIE: Gaza
Ed Potton in The Times.
“It’s a tiny 25-mile strip, enclosed by the Mediterranean and tightly sealed borders with Israel and Egypt. Yet Gaza is explored in Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s poetic and humane documentary less as a flashpoint of geopolitical strife than as the home of living, breathing people…Keane and McConnell don’t delve into the whys and wherefores of Israeli and Palestinian foreign policy, they just elegantly show its impact, through the eyes of the paramedic doing 16-hour shifts, the man pulled comatose from a wrecked building, and the parents screaming over their dead children.”
Released August 9th
BOOK: Crossfire by Malorie Blackman
Fiona Noble in The Guardian.
“In Crossfire (Penguin) Malorie Blackman returns to the world of her award-winning Noughts & Crosses series, set in a Britain where the dark-skinned Crosses are the ruling class. Complex family dynamics and the corrupting influence of power drive a thrilling, twisting plot told through a series of flashbacks. This may be the fifth novel in the sequence, but razor-sharp commentary on current events – from the far right to race and media bias – makes it as relevant as ever. The ending will enthrall and infuriate fans in equal measure.”
Released August 9th
SHOW: Edinburgh Fringe: The Shark is Broken
Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph.
“Something unexpectedly profound and emotionally serrated lurks below the apparently frothy surface of this dive behind the scenes of the making of Jaws. Rewinding to the summer of 1974, when the demanding, fraught location shoot was underway on the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, The Shark is Broken offers more than just mouth-watering bait for fans. It’s an eye-moistening filial homage: Ian Shaw, son of Robert, who played the pivotal role of shark-hunter Quint, is reincarnating his dad – who died in 1978, three years after the movie came out, when he was only eight.”
August 10, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25 at Assembly George Square Studios
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