The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: Our Guy In Japan
John Dugdale for The Times
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
“After Sue Perkins’s disastrous Japan series, you could be forgiven for praying for a ban on any more oriental odysseys until next year’s Olympics. However, thanks to the specific focus on machinery, as in his previous foreign trips, Guy Martin avoids the usual clichés.”
Friday at 9pm on Channel 4 (second episode of two-part documentary)
MOVIE: The Irishman
Adam Woodward at Little White Lies
“This immaculately crafted tale of power, corruption and lies, told from the perspective of an elderly, less-than-reliable narrator reckoning with a lifetime of regrets, speaks to a greater universal truth. Whatever path we choose in life – regardless of our successes and failures – we all meet the same fate, one way or another... A new American classic.”
Out on Netflix now
BOOK: A Warning by Anonymous
Julian Borger for The Guardian
“The book is by Anonymous, described on the cover as ‘a senior Trump administration official’, the same one who wrote an unsigned essay in the New York Times in September last year, declaring they were ‘part of the resistance Inside the Trump administration’ seeking to thwart the craziest impulses. Anonymous is now a year older, wiser and more depressed…Various unnamed officials are frequently cited saying such things as: ‘This place is so fucked up…There is literally no one in charge here’.”
Available now in hardback
STAGE: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
Dominic Cavendish for The Telegraph
“The evening proves (forgive the hoary phrase) absolutely spellbinding: witty, gripping, moving. Cookson and co’s imagination answers that of the original and awakens our own…Snowbound Narnia is rustled up by swathes of sheeting, pulled through the aisles then engulfing the stage area, in one of a series of theatrical strokes that collapses the distance between us and the adventurers. Simple – easily tried at home – yet there’s no sense of our being scenically short-changed; propulsive image is harnessed to galvanic idea.”
Until 2 February at the Bridge Theatre, London
