Thriller
A searching question: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, reviewed
Can the mysterious disappearance of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail be linked to a Department of Defense training facility in backwoods Maine?
Tantalisingly ambiguous – or just plain baffling: Hallow Road reviewed
An 80-minute film which for almost all of the time features two people in a car mightn’t sound particularly ambitious.…
Bad vibrations: Lazarus Man, by Richard Price, reviewed
Shudderings from a subway extension in Harlem causes a tenement building to collapse, killing six people and leading to many missing in this cinematic thriller
You’ll even hate the cat: Disclaimer, on Apple TV+, reviewed
Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking…
Small-town mysteries: A Case of Matricide, by Graeme MacRae Burnet, reviewed
The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of…
More Airplane! than Speed: Nightsleeper reviewed
Earlier this year, ITV brought us Red Eye, a six-part drama set mainly on an overnight plane from London to…
A haunting apparition: Bonehead, by Mo Hayder, reviewed
A young policewoman returns to her native Gloucestershire, hoping to solve a mystery connected to a terrible past accident there
Minor Linklater but fun: Hit Man reviewed
Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a minor Linklater but a minor Linklater is still an event. Also, after all those…
Nowhere near as miserable as I remember it: The Beatles – Let It Be reviewed
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart.…
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed
Sinister preparations for the apocalypse by a few Silicon Valley billionaires must be thwarted in this part-thriller, part-Big Tech critique, part-meditation on doomsday
Only goodwill will get you through this reboot: Paramount+’s Frasier reviewed
Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving…
Why I love a cliché
You’d have to pay me an awful lot more than I get for this column to review Monster: The Jeffrey…
Bang goes nothing
Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together…
Hiding in plain sight
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Not one for the naive
The Undeclared War has many of the traditional signifiers of a classy thriller: the assiduous letter-by-letter captioning of every location;…
A very tangled web
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…
Good cop, bad cop
Older readers may remember a time when people signalled their cultural superiority with the weird boast that they didn’t watch…
Hustlers and hoodlums
For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place…
Secrets and spies
The Courier is a Cold War spy thriller and the prospect of a Cold War spy thriller always makes my…
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
The best of British
There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against…
Diabolical twists
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
Superb but depraved
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
Holiday park hell
Make Up is the first full-length film from writer–director Claire Oakley, set in an out-of-season holiday park on the Cornish…
