This week's standout television is Dalliance on Paramount+, a beautifully written Australian drama following the heartbreaks and hilarities of a group of old friends in their 60s, starring Hugo Weaving. Reviewer Lucy Mangan noted: “Dalliance is not about plot. There are no murders nor mysteries to be investigated or suspects to be harangued. It’s a mood piece and an array of portraits of characters who have actually lived some life, been formed by meaningful experiences and come out the other side – at a later stage than we are used to seeing on our screens.”
More TV picks
Also worth watching is Rainbow Warrior on Now TV, a riveting feature-length documentary about French secret agents blowing up a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand in 1985. Sarah Dempster called it “gasp-inducing stuff, even if the documentary is at pains to keep the mood fizzy via skittish editing and a soundtrack consisting of wine-bar jazz and, inexplicably, Wang Chung.”
Netflix's The Airport Chaplain offers another moreish Hugo Weaving drama, about a do-gooder minister always saving the day at work. Luke Buckmaster said: “I doubt the lives of real airport chaplains are anywhere near as frenetic as those of this show’s protagonist, Tobias Wallace (Weaving), whose existence is a testament to that old saying: 'Not all heroes wear capes.' Sometimes, they wear hi-vis.”
On BBC iPlayer, Kabul is a tense, powerful thriller about an Afghan family during the American withdrawal and Taliban takeover. Jack Seale wrote: “Its thriller tropes, of a race against time and of risks taken under the gaze of an implacable enemy, are utilised effectively to make the story as compelling as it is appalling. August 2021 in Kabul was an awful, shameful moment in history; this show vividly re-lives it.”
Film highlights
In cinemas, De Gaulle: Résistance stars Simon Abkarian as the French general and Resistance leader, opposite Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, in the first half of a lavish two-parter. Peter Bradshaw described it as “a very enjoyable and gallopingly eventful biopic offering a good-humoured, though naturally sympathetic, perspective on France’s great wartime hero.”
Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas is an autofictional and meta drama about a director writing a film about a director writing a film. Bradshaw called it “a candidly personal movie, circling around ideas of grief, loss, the vampirism of art and the betrayal involved in basing fictional characters on real people: a complex, slightly muddled, almost surreally modernist noir-melodrama.”
From the director of Train to Busan, Colony is frenzied K-horror action trapping a small group of the non-infected in a tower block swarming with rabid hive-mind zombies. Laurence Phelan wrote: “Michael Jackson’s Thriller video might have done it first but Colony does it better, more scarily and on an epic scale.”
Shaun the Sheep Movie gets a rerelease ahead of next month's sequel The Beast of Mossy Bottom. Bradshaw praised it as “a quasi-silent film jam-packed with gags, visual ideas and narrative invention and positively bursting with comedy flavour.”
Books and albums
In books, Marlon James's The Disappearers, longlisted for the Booker prize, tells of the aftermath of a homophobic mob attack in 1980s Jamaica. Matthew Sweet's biography The Great Dictator: A Life of Barbara Cartland treats its subject with “absolute seriousness,” according to Kathryn Hughes. Colin Thubron's Passage follows a dying woman on a last journey to Egypt; John Banville called it “an exquisitely wrought novel.” Luke Harding's Betrayal examines how the US turned its back on Ukraine. Meg Mason's Sophie, Standing There is the follow-up to Sorrow and Bliss, about a heartbroken woman obsessed with an author. Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir Nobody's Girl is now out in paperback.
In music, Billy Strings's introspective fifth album So Much for Goodbyes is a moving journey through grief following his mother's death. Alexis Petridis noted: “What does cut through the gloom is the lingering thought of how rich and powerful the album you’ve just heard is.” California producer Dahi steps into the spotlight on debut Black Boy (Alternative), while Swedish musician Klara Lewis returns with more deconstructed ambient experiments on Opening.
