Benedict Cumberbatch is superb in 'inventive' Netflix series 

On paper, Netflix's six-part series "Eric" "sounds barmy", said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Set in a "gritty, pre-gentrified" 1980s New York, it stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent, "a puppeteer whose nine-year-old son goes missing on the way to school", and who "responds to this trauma by striking up a relationship with an imaginary monster" called Eric.

Vincent doesn't know or care that nobody else can see or hear this large furry creature, "because he is losing his mind". While his wife (Gaby Hoffmann) "waits by the phone or hands out missing posters on the street", he goes off the rails, at one point snorting cocaine with Eric in a nightclub lavatory. Yet weird as its premise may be, the series is "inventive" and "assured", and Cumberbatch is superb.

I'm afraid I found the series a "heavy-handed, tangled mess", said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. Written by Abi Morgan ("The Split", "The Iron Lady"), "the script often has all the subtlety of a hulking blue monster on the subway". It doesn't help, either, that scenes depicting parental grief or marital strife "are frequently undermined by a shaggy 7ft puppet popping up just moments later".

As a drama, "Eric" "is certainly brave", said Carol Midgley in The Times. But it's also a jarring mish-mash of tones and genres: "sometimes you get the darkest of noir, sometimes comedy, sometimes violence and sometimes a Disney-ish schmaltz". As I watched it, I asked myself "If it wasn't for Benedict Cumberbatch, would you carry on watching this?" The answer was "no".

by Rose Boyt  

Rose Boyt was 18 when she posed naked on a sofa for "Rose", 1978-79, a painting by her father, Lucian Freud. "Nothing had been discussed," her memoir "Naked Portrait" begins. "I just assumed I would be naked." As one of Freud's 14 acknowledged children by various women, Boyt was "grateful for any attention from her father", said Laura Freeman in The Sunday Times.

While he painted her in "full-frontal sprawl" during nocturnal sittings that lasted for months, they talked about art, literature, and Freud's childhood glimpse of Hitler in Berlin. The painter comes across as "a charismatic monster", with a talent for inspiring "abasement" in the women in his life. "I can't think of an art book with an opening page like it," said Freeman. "The writing is hypnotic and compulsive, the set-up compelling." But the intensity proves "unsustainable".

Boyt's own life to that point is evidence of Freud's "incorrigible selfishness" and "terminal irresponsibility", said Peter Carty in The i Paper. Her mother, Suzy, was a student at the Slade School of Art in the 1950s, when Freud was a lecturer there. The school expelled her for getting pregnant by Freud, who wasn't fired or even challenged about his behaviour. Days after Rose was born, Freud showed up with two lobsters and made Suzy, who was allergic to shellfish, get up and cook them.

Despite Freud's great wealth, Rose grew up in bohemian poverty, not helped by her mother's impulsive nature, which led her to swap the family home for a long voyage on a leaky cargo ship when Rose was seven. As a "comprehensive and honest chronicler of her family history", Boyt is compelling. But she has "unburdened herself of everything. Unfortunately this includes large amounts of unrelated autobiographical material." Most of this "should have been cut".

Not so, said Evgenia Siokos in The Telegraph. Some of the best chapters detail Boyt's life as an art-world It girl in the late 1970s. When Boyt isn't "being complimented on her Vivienne Westwood bondage trousers by Francis Bacon", she's being taken to Studio 54 by Andy Warhol. Some of it is admittedly not so "gossip-worthy": there are long diary excerpts and details of her therapy. "It seems like tedium, but it's a strength… 'Naked Portrait' is a hall of mirrors with the young Boyt at its centre… Its events juxtapose, clash and occasionally confuse, painting a portrait of Freud that's even more revealing than his nude depiction of Rose."

Documentary filmmaker who shone a light on McDonald's

Morgan Spurlock, who has died aged 53, "owed his career to a Big Mac", said The Times. In 2002, he saw a TV news story about two young women who were suing McDonald's for allegedly misleading them about the nutritional content of its burgers and fries, causing them to gain excess weight. In response, a spokesman for the fast-food giant insisted that McDonald's food could not be linked to obesity, because it was healthy and nutritious. This gave him the idea for a documentary, in which he would test that claim by eating only food from McDonald's for 30 days.

The rules he set himself also stipulated that if he was asked by the server if he'd like to "super-size" his food or drink, he'd always say yes; and he'd adjust his exercise routine, so that he took only the 5,000 steps that is the US average. "Let's find out, I'm ready," he said cheerily to the camera, at the start of the project. Within a few days, he was vomiting, depressed and developing "McSweats". By the end, he was 24.5lb heavier, and his body fat levels were up 7%. He had lost his sex drive; and though he felt "grossed out" by the idea of fast food, he was also craving it. It took him 14 months to lose the extra weight, and he claimed that he was thereafter more prone to gaining weight, because his body had lost its "resiliency".

The resulting documentary, "Super Size Me", cost about $60,000 to make and grossed $22 million. It was nominated for an Oscar, and made Spurlock – instantly recognisable with his wide smile and walrus moustache – a household name. It also put renewed focus on the impact of McDonald's in a country where a quarter of the population visited a fast-food restaurant every day. McDonald's withdrew its super-size option six weeks after the film premiered, having introduced a new Go Active! menu at the time of the film's release.

Spurlock wasn't the first to warn about the dangers posed by multinational giants, said The Telegraph: Naomi Klein's book "No Logo" and Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" preceded his film by some years. Neither of them, however, had anything like its impact. Yet many raised doubts about the film. Of course, it was hardly news that a diet consisting of nothing but vast mounds of chips and burgers would be bad for your health, said The Guardian. Spurlock did not help his case by refusing to release logs of his diet; and the revelation that he had been drinking during the shoot further reinforced the view that he was a flashy showman, more interested in entertaining viewers with "gonzo" stunts and grizzly factoids than in asking serious questions about why and how fast-food restaurants have become so ubiquitous, in low-income neighbourhoods in particular.

Spurlock was born in West Virginia, where his father ran a car repair shop and his mother worked as a teacher. He loved "Monty Python" as a child, and recalled practising "silly walks" aged six or seven. After graduating from NYU, he hoped to become a film director. But after a stint working as Woody Allen's assistant on "Bullets Over Broadway", and Luc Besson's on "Leon", he moved into reality TV. He made some 70 films and TV shows after "Super Size Me", ranging from "Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden" (2008), to "One Direction: This Is Us" (2013); but in a blogpost in 2017, he admitted that he'd been accused of rape at college, and had paid off an assistant who'd accused him of harassing her. "I have been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had," he also wrote, explaining that he had been sexually abused in his youth. The result, said The Washington Post, was "career death".