The Week’s best film, TV, book and live show on this weekend, with excerpts from the top reviews.
TELEVISION: McDonald and Dodds
Nicole Lampert for the Mail’s Weekend Magazine
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“We Brits have always loved our crime dramas and they often become huge hits around the world. McDonald And Dodds is Midsomer Murders meets Death In Paradise, with a bit of Miss Marple thrown in. It’s murder with the lightest of touches, in which no one seems to mourn the dead person. And while everyone is running around trying to work out whodunnit, there is the beautiful backdrop of the city of Bath to enjoy.”
Episode 1 airs Friday 28 February, 8pm on ITV
MOVIE: Dark Waters
Owen Gleiberman in Variety
“What does a rabble-rousing, fight-the-power, ripped-from-the-headlines corporate-conspiracy whistleblower drama look like in the Trump era? It looks like Todd Haynes’ ‘Dark Waters’ — which is to say, it looks very dark indeed. And also potent and gripping and necessary…Movies like ‘Dark Waters’ always deliver you to the same place, to that shining land where David defeats Goliath. But not this one — it’s a feel-good movie and a feel-disturbed movie at the same time. But that’s what’s haunting about it. Todd Haynes has made the first corporate thriller that’s a call to action because you’ll emerge from it feeling anything but safe.”
Released 28 February
BOOK: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
Candice Millard in The New York Times
“Through the remarkably skilful use of intimate diaries as well as public documents, some newly released, Larson has transformed the well-known record of 12 turbulent months, stretching from May of 1940 through May of 1941, into a book that is fresh, fast and deeply moving…The Blitz — its tense, terror-filled days, the horrors it inflicted — is palpable throughout this book, often by way of the kind of wrenching, carefully chosen facts that not only bring a story to life but also make a reader stop, look up and say to whoever happens to be nearby, ‘Listen to this.’”
Published 25 February
STAGE: A Number
Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph
“‘A number’ is the simple first line, spoken by a youngish man called Bernard, reeling from surprise information that he’s part of some batch of ‘copies’, quantity unspecified. “I don’t know what I think, I feel terrible,” he splutters, as his father – a man called Salter – offers a mixture of indignation (asserting that Bernard’s DNA must have been stolen) and evasion (which breeds fast-growing suspicions). Just as Salter’s story begins to unravel, so in a way does his boy – not his first offspring, it transpires, but a replica of an older child, initially posited as having died, along with his mother, but later revealed to be alive, estranged, and vengeful.”
At the Bridge Theatre, London until 14 March
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