A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any…
Statistics say murder is most likely to be committed within families. Catherine (Cat) Hogan is convinced her provincial Irish family is a case in point. She suspects her father Jim was responsible for her mother’s supposedly accidental death, but nobody will believe her. For years, her father and siblings openly questioned her stability and undermined…
Charmian “Charlie” Ross is an insecure, hard-partying actress, so there should be plenty of people in Hollywood who could handle the part. Yet, there are reasons why this John le Carré character has been such a tricky role to cast. The author himself has stated he based Ross on his half-sister, actress Charlotte Cornwell, whom…
When the first season of Netflix’s adaptation of Marvel’s Daredevil hit the streaming service, I blew through it. It featured some pretty fantastic characters and casting in the form of Boardwalk Empire‘s Charlie Cox as the title character and Vincent D’Onofrio as the chief antagonist, Wilson Fisk, AKA the Kingpin of Crime. That series was followed…
Julia Roberts is here to help. Her mere presence as the lead of a new conspiracy thriller TV series, based on a podcast, premiering in its ten-episode entirety on a streaming site that started its life as a book retailer, shows us how far television has evolved as a medium. It is highly debatable how…
This is the third time the BBC has adapted Wilkie Collins’ iconic novel, The Woman in White. Previously, there were also several silent films, a 1948 Hollywood movie co-starring Sidney Greenstreet, Vadim Derbenyov’s 1982 Soviet production, Andrew Lloyd Weber brought it to the West End and Broadway (ironically his best but least successful book musical),…
I was late to the party on Sons of Anarchy, FX’s hit series that ran from 2008-2014. I watched the pilot and wasn’t super impressed by it, and I was also wrongly under the impression that a show about a biker gang wasn’t for me. Thankfully, enough buzz built up after the first season, and…
Hello, and welcome back to my look at Season 2 of the Marvel/Netflix collaboration, Iron Fist. Since this season was (thankfully) shorter than the previous, I’ll bring this feature to a close today with an examination of Episode 8: “Citadel on the Edge of Vengeance”; Episode 9: “War Without End”; and Episode 10: “A Duel…
Despite its utter failure to provide stability for the German people between the wars, the late Weimar Republic has been fabulously successful in another regard: providing the perfect morally dubious backdrop for generations of spy, political, and crime thrillers. If noir ever lived anywhere, it was in Weimar Berlin—amidst political and economic upheaval, social unrest,…
Hello, and welcome back to my look at the sophomore season of the Marvel/Netflix show Iron Fist. Last time, we kicked things off with a look at episodes 1-4, which weren’t great but were still way better than anything from the train wreck that was Iron Fist Season 1. Can the show continue to get…
