Tom Salinsky

Just when I thought I might – after over forty years of fairly dedicated following – be even a little bit over Doctor Who, along comes an episode which completely restores my faith in the format, cast, creative team and everything. This all just worked, despite (or maybe because of) some pretty big swings.

My heart sank just a little when i realised that after last week’s 1950s-inflected bad sci-fi robots, we were heading out into… the 1950s. And there is a teeny bit of the Russell playbook on show here. In 2005, Davies set the template of “Companion-centric story set on contemporary Earth, followed by bonkers sci-fi adventure, followed by trip to the past, followed by two-parter…” and so on, all the way to the showdown with the Big Bad in the final instalment. Even Moffat stuck to this fairly closely (for one year at least). Here, we condense the first two beats into a single story, so this week a trip to the past it is. But this isn’t another celebrity historical. This has other things on its mind.

Mr Ring-a-Ding is an extraordinary creation. Brilliantly and terrifyingly voiced by a returning Alan Cumming, his beautifully animated bendy body perfectly evokes Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s (which absolutely would still be showing in 1950s cinemas) and the integration with the live action is likewise flawlessly done. Even the Doctor and Belinda’s trip to Toontown and their own renderings as cartoon characters looks fantastic, and yet feels real and high stakes.

Not satisfied with having Mrs Flood lightly tap on the fourth wall, now show sees the Doctor and Belinda literally and metaphorically destroy it and we meet three bit-character fans – a portrait both warmly affectionate and bitingly satirical, thanks to sharp writing and three lovely performances. It’s great that they give the Doctor his way out, and even better that we (and they) have to watch film cans going up in smoke as the nitrate film (only just being replaced by more stable materials) is sacrificed by the noble projectionist, who burns up the recreation of his beloved to save the rest of the people trapped.

But the most effective scene might possibly be the one in the diner as the Doctor – and Belinda – face some of the uncomfortable realities of travelling into the past. Doing in five minutes what Rosa couldn’t manage in a whole episode, here’s a clear-eyed look at America’s racist past which needs to be acknowledged but which isn’t allowed to overwhelm the whole affair.

Add to this some decent (but not perfect) American accents, a lovely sense of time and place, a plot which kept me on my toes but never felt unfocused, and I think we have here a classic for the ages. Doctor Who is back. How could I have ever doubted it?

Eh… it was fine.

Look, I’ll give some fuller thoughts in a minute, but for the first time that I can remember, I’m finding it hard to get excited about the show. The relentless negativity from some quarters of fandom is really getting me down, and it doesn’t help that the programme itself seems to have settled into a comfortable groove, parcelling out a leisurely eight episodes a year, seemingly without breaking much of a sweat. Don’t misunderstand me – everything we got since Russell returned has been better than almost anything Chris Chibnall oversaw, but all the very best stuff was in those first three specials. And although Ncuti is a magnetic presence, none of the stories has been as consistent and as surefooted as The Star Beast, or as evocative as Wild Blue Yonder (73 Yards came close) or contained anything as bravura as the Toymaker’s re-entrance in The Giggle.

So, for a season opener, this was… fine. The huge robots looked a bit like the ones in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and they plucked Belinda out of her suburban home a bit like the Wrarth did in The Star Beast, and the Doctor joined the rebellion and overthrew the evil empire like that archetypal story Andrew Cartmel used to take the piss out of. Verada Sethu works in a hospital which the Doctor causes to lose all power – ho ho ho. She’s… fine – but she seemed more engaged playing Mundy Flynn and we were just getting to know Ruby Sunday. The every-ninth-word gag is good but seems a bit arbitrary. Mrs Flood is here. Nicholas Briggs is the voice of the robots. It’s all absolutely fine.

The best bit was probably the death of Thalia. The Doctor having lived on Missbelindachandra One for six months is a little glib, but his partnership with Thalia felt real and it was genuinely shocking to see her disintegrated. But other than that, this isn’t anything like as epoch-defining as Rose, as exciting as Smith and Jones, as funny as Partners in Crime, as fresh as The Eleventh Hour, as bonkers as The Bells of St John or as engaging as The Pilot. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t do anything wrong. It was just… fine.

I stumbled across Columbo as a teenager, idly channel hopping. It was the one with Dick van Dyke as a photographer and I remember not being able to work out if it was a TV show or a movie. This is one of several odd things about this amazing series. It formed part of what was called the NBC Mystery Wheel which variously occupied either a 90 minute or a two-hour prime time slot and would cycle through various different crime shows, each presenting a movie-length edition. Columbo would be followed next week by McCloud or McMillan and Wife or Quincy. This meant each production team only had to come up with 7-8 editions each year and could take their time.

Columbo stands out for a few reasons. Creators Richard Levinson and William Link had been inspired by, among other things, Dial M for Murder, Les Diaboliques and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown. The character went from a short story to a one-off TV play, to a stage play to a one-off TV movie (all with the same basic plot) and it’s here that Peter Falk was cast – the studio wanted Bing Crosby. The novelty with the original story, and the thing which inspired the writers to keep recycling it, was that it was an “inverted mystery”. The first act showed how the murder was committed, by whom and why. The rest of the drama was about how he got caught. Not a “whodunnit” but a “howcatchem”. Could the trick be repeated?

A second one-off TV movie showed that it could, and so Columbo was commissioned, and Peter Falk became a bone fide star. It’s often said that Americans don’t have a class system, but Columbo gives the lie to that assertion. Not only is the central character mild, self-effacing and unfailingly polite in the face of a parade of arrogant, self-aggrandising, pompous killers – he’s a blue collar copper bringing down wealthy evildoers who skulk in mansions and stalk the corridors of power.

It ran for eight years and was then brought back in the late eighties, with occasional specials through the nineties – 69 episodes in all, pretty much all hewing to this formula. And Columbo’s bumbling and deferential manner was in stark contrast to the macho antics of rivals Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Magnum PI – even Cagney and Lacey. It’s fondly remembered and there has been much speculation about a remake. Mark Ruffalo has been known to be interested, and there’s a tiny hint of Columbo in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.

A bit more than a hint is to be found in Johnson’s 2023 TV series Poker Face which borrows the inverted mystery structure, unassuming lead and even the font for the titles from Columbo. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a drifter with a freakish ability to detect liars. In an age of prestige streaming series, this felt refreshingly case-of-the-week with just a hint of a continuing storyline, setting up a big bad in the first episode and despatching him in the last. It has been renewed for a second season.

Not to be outdone, The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King picked up their recurring character of Chicago lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and dropped her down in New York City, attached to the police department where she quickly becomes an asset to the team. Once again, most episodes open with a crime being committed, leaving us in little doubt who has done what, and why, and the fun is watching Elsbeth figure it out. This she tends to do a little too quickly and easily for my taste – the clues are subtler in Poker Face and that’s more fun. A shame as I often felt that The Good Wife was the one American lawyer show which really managed to balance the legal jargon with the needs of easily-digestible narrative. A second series is airing currently.

Meanwhile, the BBC was getting in on the act, with their own quirky-individual-works-with-the-police-to-solve-crimes show. David Mitchell is puzzle-setter John “Ludwig” Taylor whose identical twin brother James is a) a detective and b) mysteriously missing. John is persuaded by his brother’s wife to pose as his brother in order to determine his whereabouts and quickly becomes an asset to the team his brother worked with. Time and again, his puzzle-skills become relevant, but although we see portions of the crime, we don’t always know whodunnit and this doesn’t play by proper Agatha Christie rules either – we usually aren’t given enough information to work it out for ourselves. But this hardly matters when the series is so charming and Mitchell is so well cast. It has been renewed for a second season.

So, in the English-speaking world, the TV landscape is and always has been awash with quirky are-they-cops-or-aren’t-they gallantly and unassumingly fighting crime, but in France it’s not such a familiar cliché – which meant there was a gap in the market. This was filled in 2021 when Stéphane Carrié, Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, and Nicolas Jean created HPI (short for Haut potentiel intellectual) in which office cleaner Morgane Alvaro gets seconded to the Lille police force and quickly becomes an asset to the team.

In short order, this was snapped up by ABC television in the states who put Drew Goddard in charge of it and cast Kaitlin Olson (who I’ve discovered is not an Olsen twin) as Morgan Gillory, a high potential individual who is talked into becoming a police consultant and who quickly becomes an asset to the team. You can watch High Potential on Disney+ in the UK and it has been renewed for a second season. This doesn’t commit to the inverted mystery structure – most episodes play out as a more typical police procedural, but it still feels to me like part of the same family.

There’s also Kathy Bates as Matlock, to add to our roster of usually-gender-flipped, easy-to-underestimate, quirky-kind-of-cop, solves-impossible crimes, case-of-the-week shows – but there are some quite serious and complicated problems with this iteration, which I might leave for a future essay. In the meantime, here’s your rundown of The Spawn of Columbo.

COLUMBO

Transmitted: 1968-1977 on NBC, 1989-2003 on ABC.

Starring: Peter Falk as Lt Columbo (no first name ever given) of the LAPD.

Quirks: Wears a shabby raincoat, drives a beaten-up car, sometimes has a dog (called “dog”), puffs on cheap cigars. Is often a huge fan of the very wealthy and famous killer and awestruck to be in their company. A working class stiff typically in a nouveau riche world.

Magic powers: His attention to detail is matched only by his faith in humanity. He tenaciously locks on to the killer early in the episode and all but annoys them into confessing.

Episode structure: All the classic episodes show the crime committed in detail before Columbo even shows up. A handful of later episodes mess with this formula and it kind of ruins the fun.

Supporting characters: Effectively none. A handful of coroners or other police workers show up in a few episodes, but Columbo is a lone wolf by design.

Star killers: An amazing roster of familiar faces including Patrick McGoohan (four times), Robert Culp, Ruth Gordon, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (in different episodes). Even Billy Connolly (although it’s not a great outing).

Ongoing narrative: None whatsoever (it was the 1970s, are you kidding).

POKER FACE

Transmitted: 2023- on Peacock (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale who drifts around various parts of the United States.

Quirks: Not nearly as deferential as Columbo, Charlie is usually cheerful and friendly, but has a wide cynical streak and plenty of street smarts. Paradoxically, her magic powers (see below) make it almost impossible for her to keep down a job, so we usually discover her making ends meet doing grunt work of some kind.

Magic powers: Charlie has a sixth sense for liars, which often manifests as an almost involuntary “bullshit” when a fib reaches her ears.

Episode structure: As with Columbo, we usually see all the details of the crime unfold before Natasha Lyonne makes her entrance. The wrinkle here is that after the first act break, rather than the main character only now arriving on the scene, we rewind and see much of the same events again, but from Charlie’s point-of-view. She had been there all along, we just didn’t see her. It’s fun. Also fun – Charlie isn’t a cop so sometimes she hands the baddies over to the forces of law and order, and sometimes she has to rely on natural justice.

Supporting characters: Charlie is fundamentally a loner, but she forges an uneasy alliance with Simon Helberg’s FBI agent who appears in a few episodes.

Star killers: This is stuffed with familiar faces including Nick Nolte, Tim Meadows, Adrien Brody, Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Hsu, Tim Blake Nelson, Ellen Barkin and many more.

Ongoing narrative: After the events of the first episode, Charlie is pursued by Benjamin Bratt and eventually faces down Ron Perlman, but if you just watch episodes 2-9, you’ll scarcely notice this.

ELSBETH

Transmitted: 2024- on CBS (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni, Chicago lawyer appointed to provide the NYPD was some needed oversight.

Quirks: Elsbeth is a very enthusiastic and perky middle-aged woman, who dresses in garish outfits and is sometimes too quick to speak her mind. Like Columbo, she is easily impressed by rich and famous types, and very disappointed to discover that they have blood on their hands.

Magic powers: Like many of her TV peers, Elsbeth is freakishly perceptive and notices many details which others miss.

Episode structure: Frequently makes use of the inverted mystery structure, but isn’t wedded to it – and as noted, the plotting isn’t quite as A1 as on Poker Face.

Supporting characters: A much more traditional roster of supporting characters, which gives a general throughline of: how much faith will these beat cops and career detectives learn to place in this kooky lawyer from out-of-town? Adding much class is The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Captain Wagner. Cara Patterson as Kaya Blanke serves as an effective 2IC. Various other detectives float in and out, but none makes a huge impression, and you could say the same for Elsbeth’s son, Kaya’s dishy roommate and so on.

Star killers: Once again this is stuffed to the gills. Say hello to Jane Krakowski, Blair Underwood, Laurie Metcalf, Vanessa Bayer, Eric McCormack, Alan Ruck, Keegan-Michael Key, Matthew Broderick and countless others.

Ongoing narrative: A thin slip of a continuing storyline surrounds Elsbeth’s true reason for being in New York, and she gradually becomes closer and closer to Maya over the course of Season 1. Having exonerated Captain Wagner, in Season 2 she comes under suspicion herself, and there’s a further ongoing storyline which surrounds Lost’s Michael Emerson, whose entrance in the cold open of the episode One Angry Woman is nothing short of genius. Despite having (a bit) more screentime devoted to the season arc than Poker Face, this generally does a good job of balancing both aspects.

LUDWIG

Transmitted: 2024- on BBC One

Starring: David Mitchell as John “Ludwig” Taylor, a reclusive puzzle-setter.

Quirks: Cripplingly shy and introverted, with a strong sense of self-preservation, John cares deeply for his brother and his brother’s family, and he loves a good puzzle. He sometimes fails to take into account other people’s feelings, and is a shockingly poor improviser, which makes it all the more remarkable that his fairly inept deception isn’t tumbled immediately.

Magic powers: He da puzzle king.

Episode structure: Rather than seeing all the details of the crime, we get a few hints about what really happened before the police show up.

Supporting characters: Nice turns from Dipo Ola as James’s partner DI Carter and Sophie Willan as the station’s IT expert. Anna Maxwell-Martin is luminous as always. The unchanging team of younger coppers is a bit more anonymous. Ralph Ineson makes a strong impression.

Star killers: Not bad for a home-grown show. The first batch of episodes includes appearances from Felicity Kendall and Derek Jacobi, but this isn’t the usual case of “arrest the most famous person in the cast, they probably did it.” Many of the guest actors are familiar from other UK TV shows, but very few are really huge names.

Ongoing narrative: John’s deception is a foregrounded feature of many instalments, and the reasons for it take up half of episode one and most of episode six, but it is very engaging if slightly ludicrous. Season 2 has been set up without this element and it remains to be seen whether the show will be stronger or weaker without it – especially given how exciting it is when the whole house of cards collapses in episode six.

HIGH POTENTIAL

Transmitted: 2024- on ABC (now showing on Disney+ in the UK)

Starring: Kaitlin Olson as cleaner turned police consultant Morgan Gillory.

Quirks: Morgan hates unsolved puzzles, and is brash and overconfident, despite clearly having no shortage of empathy. Whereas Columbo was often star-struck, Morgan is impossible to impress and treats everyone the same.

Magic powers: Morgan sees everything, notices everything, and has a photographic memory as well as the kind of wide-ranging general knowledge which would put the average quizzer to shame. Here’s another contrast with Columbo. Peter Falk’s character was fascinated by new technology and always found something new to learn. Morgan Gillory already knows arcane details about which way churches face or the life cycles of exotic animals just by watching cable TV or listening to podcasts.

Episode structure: As with Ludwig, we tend to get an incomplete version of the murder which keeps us guessing as to who really did what to whom.

Supporting characters: Like Elsbeth, this is as much about the slowly deepening relationships and bond of trust between Morgan and her co-workers, and Morgan learning the rules of cop-land. She’s partnered with Daniel Sunjata as Detective Karadec, who manages not to turn his part into too broad a piece of comic relief, and it’s always nice to see Judy Reyes from Scrubs now as the head of the LAPD Major Crimes Division. A couple of other less charismatic cops are also hanging around (same team every time), plus Morgan has kids and an ex-husband played by Taran Killam from SNL (and Scrubs).

Star killers: The Amazing Spider Man’s Marc Webb directed an episode – does that count?

Ongoing narrative: Morgan’s deal for working with the police includes resources to investigate the disappearance of her first husband, but this comes up far less often than you’d think.

All of which brings us to Kathy Bates as Matlock, who once again is an unassuming quirky character who has talked her way into joining a team in order to investigate wrong-doings, but who is also pursuing her own agenda. And yet, for all its superficial similarities, this is a very different show – and I think a worse one. All of the foregoing are well-made, highly entertaining procedurals of the kind we weren’t getting any more. Maybe we’ll talk about Matlock in a few days…

Mysteriously not nominated for a single Oscar, despite its star walking home with a clutch of awards all over town, Hard Truths finds Mike Leigh back in Naked territory, giving us a portrait of a thoroughly unlikeable motormouth anti-hero and daring us not to fall in love. Marianne Jean-Baptiste does incredible work as Pansy, whose brittle Karen-ish behaviour to everyone around her barely conceals an inner core of deep pain and loneliness. This drives her husband and son into a near-silent fugue state of incomprehending stoicism, and contrasts strongly with her two nieces who won’t let a little thing like Sam Spiro being loathesomely patronising put a spoke in the wheels of their plans for a Mother’s Day brunch. Sitting in the middle is Pansy’s sister Chantelle, where Michele Austin is much less showy than Jean-Baptiste but who navigates a tricky path between optimism and despair.

As usual, Mike Leigh’s improvisatory and exploratory script-writing delivers complex and truthful characters and wonderful performances, but as sometimes happens doesn’t provide us with a neat structure or much in the way of climactic catharsis. That Mother’s Day brunch looks to be the scene where all the narrative threads come together, but it passes and leads to a faintly irrelevant coda, centring David Webber’s Curtley almost as much as Pansy, and sidelining Chantelle. For the first four-fifths, however, this is epic, often hilarious, frequently heartbreaking stuff and I can only hope it does better at the BAFTAs than it did in Hollywood.

Of rather less interest is Robert Zemeckis’s slickly experimental single-camera-angle movie Here, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and which reunited the director with his Forrest Gump team of screenwriter Eric Roth and lead actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. At least I think it’s them. For most of the running time they’re concealed behind a smear of de-aging (or up-aging) pixels, and it’s deeply to their credit that something resembling a performance manages to emerge from underneath all the digital shenanigans. This is especially true given that Roth hasn’t thought of anything remotely novel, insightful or even interesting for them or any of the other characters to say, so they just mouth Hallmark platitudes about how time flies or the future is coming as the narrative hyperactively pings from decade-to-decade seemingly at random. A couple of times, the juxtaposition of events from different periods in history brushes past something like wit, such as when a leaky roof is overlaid with a woman’s waters breaking, but these moments are the exceptions rather than the norm.

To facilitate the artifice of both the permanently locked-off camera and the huge time jumps, the whole thing was shot at Pinewood, hence the slightly disconcerting presence of so many familiar British TV faces from Michelle Dockery to Nikki Amuka-Bird to Kelly Reilly to Angus Wright to Ophelia Lovibond. All do decent accents (except possibly for Paul Bettany who seems permanently constipated) but it’s yet more artifice for a film that wants to be telling a sweet simple story about family, but which hasn’t figured out what the story is, or why we should care, or why it’s better to shoot it this way.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Conclave – no, not enjoy: savour. It looks magnificent and Edward Berger continues his productively discordant partnership with composer Volker Bertelmann whose strident foghorning helped make All Quiet on the Western Front so evocative. We have some of this generation’s finest Old Men of Acting giving it everything they’ve got. And who wouldn’t want to peek behind the curtain of decision making at the Vatican? Decision making is one of the keystones of storytelling, whether it’s Chaplin being forced to eat his own shoe, Michael realising only he can take out McClusky or Han Solo coming back to save Luke Skywalker.

But this time, Berger isn’t adapting a classic German novel born out of the pain of a generation-defining conflict. This time, his source text is a Robert Harris page-turner – maybe not quite an airport thriller, but definitely aiming to build suspense and pass the time rather than leaving the reader pondering great questions about the nature of humanity and goodness. And if the characters in Conclave spend any time at all pondering such questions, they do it off-screen, as when they’re in front of the camera, they’re scheming and plotting in a way much more befitting Francis Urquhart or Malcolm Tucker. We know Ralph Fiennes’s earnest and studious Cardinal Lawrence is experiencing a mild crisis of faith because he tells us so – not because it’s dramatised in any particularly interesting way.

Yes, the plot did keep me guessing, but this is also sometimes to the film’s detriment, as the rules of the thriller to which it’s so wedded mean that the clearly-telegraphed penultimate twist must needs be topped by a final somewhat ludicrous twist. To be clear, this is partly the fun of what is a very entertaining and engaging film. It’s endlessly charming and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny to see these pompous clerics in their ornate robes sneaking a crafty ciggie, fiddling with an iPhone or hacking into someone else’s email. But the actual storytelling couldn’t be less interested in the philosophical debates about the future of the Catholic church, and is only just interested enough in the personalities of the main players to make the plot work.

That leaves us with the actors, and here Isabella Rossellini is effortlessly commanding, Fiennes and Tucci elevate the thin material they’re given and Lucian Msamati – whose Cardinal Adeyemi actually is given a little bit of depth and nuance – is very impressive. What baffles me slightly is why John Lithgow took the gig. I’m certain he doesn’t need the work and his character exists solely to wax his moustache and cackle evilly. A missed opportunity.

In terms of character depth, A Complete Unknown is sort of the opposite. Monica Barbaro manages to mine the flimsy screenplay and comes up with a complete character with a rich interior life seemingly from nowhere. Everyone else seems satisfied with doing impersonations and moving through the relevant Wikipedia entries until 140 minutes is up. Maybe that’s because Elle Fanning looks so completely lost – because her character is the only one that’s invented.

I came to this knowing nothing much at all about Bob Dylan, which meant on the one hand that I wouldn’t be huffing and fuming and nit picking as the inevitable artistic licenses were taken. On the other hand, that means things need to be explained to me to make the story work, and various things seemed to happen which were given profound significance without paying off in any meaningful way. Dylan’s first album is all covers. Why? Did they sell? How did he persuade the record company to let him record originals? Who are these two different round men who smoke cigars both of whom seem to be something to do with his management but neither of whom is ever introduced or seen to be making decisions which impact his life or career. Who’s this guy bullying his way into the recording session and ending up playing the organ? What, to be blunt, is the point of any of this, other than to check off events in the life of a famous asshole?

But I could have stood a bit of confusion about the finer points of the music industry if the character work had been stronger. Timothee Chalamet is a fine talent and has clearly worked incredibly hard to summon up Dylan’s manner and musical abilities. But if we aren’t given any insight into who he was and what he wanted, then the entire exercise seems futile. Early on, I appreciated the measured pace and there were some nice moments between Chalamet’s puppy-dog 20-year-old Dylan and Edward Norton’s avuncular Pete Seeger. But after the first half hour, this turns into Folk Hard: The Bobby Dylan Story with a dedication that seems almost demented.

Eight down, two to go.

And they’re off. The starter’s gun has been fired for this year’s Oscars race, and while it wasn’t hard to predict most of the films appearing in most of the categories, there were still some surprises. Chief of these is that the most nominated film is Jacques Audiard’s bonkers transgender Spanish language gangster musical redemption fantasy Emilia Pérez which can count thirteen mentions. This is to a certain extent artificial, but even if you discount Best International Feature and ignore one of its two Best Original Song mentions, it would still top the list with eleven, just ahead of The Brutalist and Wicked, both with ten.

Together with strong showings in the directing and editing categories, that suggests that the contest for Best Picture is between those three, but I think Emilia Pérez will struggle to convert a lot of its chances and I also wouldn’t rule out Conclave, which might not have as many pluses as some of its rivals (and only garnered eight nominations, tying it with A Complete Unknown), but it doesn’t have any negatives – it isn’t weird, it isn’t a musical, it isn’t TikTok friendly and none of its characters were revoiced by AI.

Let’s rundown the Best Picture nominees and I’ll give you some further thoughts.

Anora was a delightful surprise when I took myself off to see it earlier this year. Sean Baker is a very fine filmmaker indeed and the promise he showed with The Florida Project is fully flowering here (I didn’t see Red Rocket but I’ve heard good things). I don’t think this has much of a chance of winning Best Picture, but it’s the kind of movie which could pick up a screenplay award as a sort of consolation prize.

The Brutalist is about as compelling as a 200-minute movie about architecture could possibly hope to be. Adrien Brody is amazing and the guest cast almost uniformly strong. I wasn’t always convinced by Felicity Jones, AI or no AI, but this is a huge and very Oscar-friendly achievement, and currently the bookies’ favourite. I just wonder whether it’s a bit too weighty to have lots of people putting it at the top of their ballots. Full review here.

A Complete Unknown looks great, provided it can avoid enough Dewey Cox clichés, and Timothée Chalamet can usually be relied upon to elevate weaker material. I’ll try and see it very soon.

Conclave likewise has passed me by and looks like hand-milled Oscar bait, but I think that voters who want serious and meaningful will prefer The Brutalist and those who want something with a bit more flair and dash will go for Emilia Pérez – but then maybe Conclave will come through the middle? Against that, Edward Berger hasn’t been nominated as Best Director, which must hurt the film’s chances.

Dune: Part Two feels like it’s here to make up the numbers. I don’t have any particular fondness for the Duniverse, but I went to see both movies on the big screen and I had a good time. I don’t entirely know if the effort required to create them is appropriate to the entertainment value I derived from them, but I don’t have any real complaints about either. The chances of a science-fiction sequel winning Best Picture however are slim to say the least.

And you might think that a similar calculation applies to Emilia Pérez but with nominations for two of its cast, its director, its screenplay and its editing, it must be in with a shout. The bookies have it just behind The Brutalist which sounds right to me – and there’s quite a jump in price, so you could clean up if you got it right.

Of I’m Still Here and Nickel Boys I know almost nothing, but I will – as usual – attempt to see them on a big screen before the first Sunday in March. The Substance I’m delighted to find on the list, as it is already one of my favourite films of the year, and I found it utterly compelling. Full review here.

Lastly, we have Jon M Chu’s Wicked (shorn of its “Part One” suffix) which I thought was one of the best stage-to-screen musical adaptations I’ve seen recently (not quite as good as Matilda though). And yes, a lot of the set-ups will have to be paid off next year which isn’t ideal, but as vastly elongated first acts of musicals go, this is exemplary. Review here.

In other categories, Best Actor looks like a straight fight between Adrien Brody and Timothée Chalamet, Best Actress looks nailed on for Demi Moore, likewise Kieran Culkin is getting a lot of attention for A Real Pain, and Zoe Saldaña will surely win for Emilia Pérez even if that film is shut out elsewhere. Likewise, Conclave must have a good chance at winning Best Adapted Screenplay even if it is not given much love in other categories.

And speaking of films not given much love, it’s a double Guadagnino shut-out with no nominations at all for either Challengers or Queer, and it looks like Nicole Kidman humped all those rugs for nothing as Babygirl has been completely overlooked. Some Academy watchers also expected to see mentions for Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, and Denzil Washington for Gladiator II, which only gets a nod for its costume design. There was also a lot of enthusiasm for Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, but not from the Academy.

Right, time for me to book some movie tickets. See you back here soon.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Doctor Who Christmas special is a relatively recent invention – by which I mean it didn’t happen in the first 26 years of the show’s existence. The revived show is now getting on for twenty years old, which feels profoundly unlikely, but when the first series was a success, news rapidly came that we were getting two more series and a Christmas special. The Christmas Invasion saw new incumbent David Tennant take on the Sycorax and it had a lot to accomplish if it was going to succeed, but it did so brilliantly.

Now, for whatever reason, fandom is divided and disgruntled, as culture wars and general internet-led entitlement lead to furiously toxic pronouncements across all parts of social media. After the mixed reception that the rebooted reboot got earlier this year, Joy to the World needed to do almost as much as the 2005 special in order to be even a qualified success.

I haven’t seen an awful lot of general chatter about this one, but I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was excellent. Ncuti Gatwa, who made a very bold debut, now seems to be brimming with confidence, giving us a lonely, isolated Doctor who hasn’t even noticed that the TARDIS doesn’t have any chairs. He’s joined by a cracking guest cast headed by luminous Nicola Coughlan, but let’s not forget Joel Fry, Stephanie de Whalley, Jonathan Aris and many more. The opening is almost Moffat parodying himself, but explanations are quickly forthcoming and the Time Hotel is a lovely concept, both fresh and instantly-graspable.

Joy’s self-sacrifice isn’t a huge surprise, but that means it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and Coughlan sells the hell out of it, but my favourite bit was the entirely self-contained sojourn in that grim hotel. Structurally, this is not needed at all – it’s the kind of “closed loop” plotting which Terrance Dicks admitted to falling back on to pad The War Games out to ten episodes, which is what allowed Benjamin Cook to prune it back to 90 minutes without significant injury. But it’s the clearest expression of the episode’s theme. Sit down. And play a game with someone you like. Amen to that.

Strongly plotted with lots of good twists and turns and a resolution that actually makes sense, it looks gorgeous (even if there wasn’t quite enough cash left for a really good T-Rex) and Alex Sanjiv Pillai keeps it all moving. I was rapt throughout and can’t wait to watch it again.

Note – spoilers throughout.

I always said it was a bad idea.

To be fair, I also said if anyone had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sean Foley, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, so I was prepared to give Dr Strangelove a chance. Plenty of beloved properties have been successfully reinvented over the years. The stage version can’t be the movie, arguably shouldn’t be the movie. Could it be successful on its own terms?

Ehhh… not really.

It’s not a failure, not by any means and Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George’s plot is still absolutely bomb-proof (pun intended) so if you’ve never been told this story before, there’s a good chance you’ll be in its spell, have a good time with the ripe performances and admire the bravura staging. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the original – or possibly even if you don’t – it’s hard to look past a series of surprising shortcomings. I think of these as forced errors, unforced errors and tonal blunders.

On screen, Peter Sellers plays three roles. Neurotic about his ability to summon up the Texan accent for Major Kong, he got himself signed off the picture after a minor accident on his first day in the cockpit, and Slim Pickens magnificently took over. That leaves one Peter Sellers on the air force base and two in the war room, which Kubrick achieves entirely with cutting and body doubles, never even trying to show both faces in the same frame. That luxury isn’t available to the stage team, and so various holes are introduced in the war room scenes where Coogan has to nip off stage, replaced on a spurious pretext and the change covered by a fairly unconvincing stand-in.

These pretexts distract from the action, the scenes lose momentum, and the fact that two key characters can’t talk to each other in the story’s final moments is a huge problem, but these are all forced errors. I don’t have any better solutions, and it wouldn’t make commercial sense to have another actor play the president, the least showy but most central of the Sellers parts.

We actually first see Strangelove via an early 1960s Zoom call, and when the Germanic scientist agrees to come and join him in person, Coogan as the president comments that that would make life easier “in some ways”. That’s a lovely joke, pressingly lightly on the fourth wall where others might have stampeded through it. It’s a rare moment of restraint, in a script which elsewhere feels like a child has gone through the movie screenplay, scribbling silly comments in the margins. In the movie, Mandrake bristles at Keenan Wynn, clocking his name badge and tartly observing “Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name.” Here Coogan just goes ahead and says “Guano? Like bird shit?” It’s such a good joke that we get Turgidson repeating the exact same words some moments later.

Now, stage and screen are very different animals, and there is an argument that the gag rate needs to be higher and the jokes need to be broader if the audience is there in person. And if the whole room had been rocking with laughter, I would have to admit that even though the vulgarity doesn’t seem to me to be an improvement on the elegant wit of the original screenplay, the piece was doing the job it set out to do. But only about one joke in five ever really landed the night I was there, with most punchlines met with soft chuckles, or total silence. If you’re committing to making this a wall-to-wall gagfest, then it needs to be Book of Morman funny, not middling student revue funny.

And these tonal lapses extend to the performances too. Coogan is quite bad as Mandrake, the part where you’d imagine he’d be most at home, playing him as a rubbery cross between Prince Charles and Alan Partridge, the script decorated with sub-PG Wodehouse British-ism like “Bally bingo bollocks” and other such drivel. That’s a shame as John Hopkins’s General Ripper is one of the highlights of the play, with just a little Donald Trump mixed into Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chomping lunacy. Coogan also struggles with Merkin Muffley, which is a better performance, but the comedy value in the president’s egg-headed earnestness seems to elude him and he badly muffs the hilarious phone call with Moscow, such a highlight of the original movie.

Once again, he’s paired with a brilliant performance from one of the supporting actors. Giles Terera, the original UK Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is terrific as Turgidson, effortlessly finding the tone which seems to be eluding so many others. Tony Jayawardena is pretty good as Ambassador Bakov too (but what was wrong with de Sadski?). Coogan is best by far as Strangelove himself, and here for once all of the pieces seem to come together, as the actor’s performance is neither a rendition of what Sellers did, nor a reaction against it, the new backstory adds rather than detracts, and Iannucci and Foley find a new way for this character to be funny.

If this was where we ended up, with some tonal lapses and some forced errors, I’d be happier to recommend this, but the unforced errors are completely confounding. Chief among these is the stuff on the B52. This is the least successful element of the whole evening. The projections are pretty, but by presenting the whole plane onstage, the production never puts us inside the cockpit, so there’s never a feeling of claustrophobia. And the two other pilots are woefully underwritten. But far more damaging are the plot changes introduced here.

A good screenplay is a piece of architecture and it’s hard to make one change without introducing problems elsewhere, and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get lost. Here, the function and the purpose of the doomsday device is muddled, with the first half making it clear that the machine has to be triggered manually, and the possibility existing of a deal to be struck whereby America destroys one of its own cities to stay the Premier’s hand (shades of Fail Safe). Only in the second half is it made clear that the whole purpose of the device is that it triggers itself automatically. And for no good reason, they cut the line “The Premier loves surprises.” This introduces confusion and gains us nothing.

But worse is to come, as the role of the OPE/POE “recall code” also gets garbled during the interval. In the first half, we’re told, in lines repeated verbatim from the movie, that the plane’s radios won’t receive at all unless messages are preceded by the appropriate three-letter-sequence (known only to the pilots and General Ripper). However, when we’re in the cockpit, this is changed to the sequence “POE” is a coded order to turn back, and rather than have the CRM discriminator destroyed when the plane is hit by the missile, it’s working fine, but Major Kong elects to ignore the order. And that change is fatal.

The American military was so worried by what the movie might do to American morale that they insisted a disclaimer be placed at the beginning. In my eyes, that only makes what follows more convincing. The nuclear deterrent is vulnerable to a single person making one bad decision and the weapons at our disposal are so devastating that the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.

Except here, where is takes two people to make bad decisions. And that isn’t as potent. Not by half.

Elsewhere, the character of Faceman adds very little, and Mark Hadfield is working way too hard. A laborious and relentlessly unfunny subplot about the Ambassador wanting fish does eventually lead us to a pretty great visual punchline, and – as noted – the production design is amazing. Most effective are probably the scenes between Ripper and Mandrake, as the physical effects and sound design really do summon up the bullets flying and Hopkins and Coogan play off each other very well. But time and again, the changes made to the script detract rather than add, sometimes in minor irritating ways, sometimes in major fatal ways.

I think the real missed opportunity here is the original ending. As written and initially shot, when the bombs began falling, the war room was to break into an enormous custard pie fight. Kubrick cut this (and destroyed the footage), feeling that it didn’t quite work to escalate from nuclear annihilation to prat falls – and he was very likely right. But onstage, the calculus is different. The bombs don’t feel as viscerally real – but the custard pies would. The actual ending isn’t bad, as a ghostly Vera Lynn transports us to a musical afterlife, but I can’t help but imagine what a more slapstick finale might have looked like. A little bit of sweaty messiness might have helped this very slick but often sterile production gain a bit more intensity.

I said it last time, and it bears repeating: the build-up is easy and the payoff is hard. One of the best ways of making the payoff really land is to have our hero achieve victory at some personal cost. The first two RTD season finales achieved this with considerable style. In Doomsday, the Doctor loses Rose and in The Parting of the Ways, he loses his life (he got better). Subsequent finales didn’t have the same power, with David Tennant’s exit undermined a little by his rather self-indulgent pre-expiry victory lap.

But we knew, or I guess we knew, that Russell wasn’t going to kill Ruby, murder Mel or have Ncuti make an early exit. So the nearest we get to a squeeze of vinegar to help the triumph over adversity feel a bit more earned is the reunion between birth mother and daughter, which felt real and complicated in the best tradition of nu-Who, but came after the villain was summarily despatched and all of the dusted citizens of the universe popped back into life again.

The other problem for finales is you have to answer all of those niggling questions. So, yes, we find out that Ruby’s mother was just a girl young in trouble, but her significance to those travelling in the TARDIS – a TARDIS with a malevolent quasi-Egyptian god wrapped invisibly around it – created a weak point in time. That’s a fair enough explanation as far as it goes, but I can only assume that the Time Window was using a hefty dose of artistic license as it depicted her pointing out a signpost to nobody with such melodramatic flair.

And of course, as soon as the world turns to sand, the spectre of a reset button rears its head. That’s the problem with bringing the apocalypse as opposed to merely threatening it. But the world stayed dead for an appreciable amount of time, and – thanks to that heartbreaking scene with Sian Clifford – we felt it as opposed to were merely informed about it. The journey also contained much that was worthwhile, with Bonnie Langford doing wonderful work, whether roaring through “London” on a Vespa, tenderly fondling Colin Baker’s old tie, collapsing in near-exhaustion on the floor of the TARDIS, or possessed by Sutekh and giving us magnificent claw-hand-of-evil acting.

Ncuti and Millie showed their class here too, with Millie’s fake-out “God of nothing” moment being a stand-out – and if you thought the secret of her mum was pure bathos, then here’s the Doctor saving the day with bungee cord, a whistle and a spoon. Detailed explanations of the whistle and the spoon were apparently both written and then discarded in favour of more showing-not-telling. It’s fine to cut pedantic explanations if they aren’t needed, but this walks a fine line between “It’s a neat trick, I’ll explain later” and “Details are boring, on with the adventure.” I think it’s on the right side of that line, but it’s a close one.

So, this is an episode of moments rather than a truly cohesive hour of storytelling, but many of the moments are fabulous, with Kate Stewart’s sign off, the Remembered TARDIS, Mrs Flood cos-playing as Romana/The White Guardian/Mary Poppins/Jackanory and Ncuti’s howl of despair into the echoing void. It’s clear this is a TARDIS team for the ages, but I hope next year Russell remembers that he doesn’t have to end the entire universe for us to care – sometimes just seeing two characters holding hands in adversity is enough.

I made the mistake of posting an eye-rolling Tweet about how the season’s mysterious big bad isn’t going to be the Valeyard – a villain associated with a charismatic performer, which looks to devoted fans like a dangling loose end in the series’ mythos, but whose backstory doesn’t really make any coherent sense in the broadcast episodes, let alone invites further forensic investigation. With the passing of Michael Jayston, the already thoroughly remote prospect of this complicated enemy being returned to receded further into the darkest recesses of possibility. Replying to another fan, I agreed that it was equally unlikely that we’d be seeing Fenric, or the Rani, or Harrison Chase, or the Drahvins. Ha ha ha. Well done to me.

Except that I started that list with Sutekh.

Now, on reflection, Sutekh is one of the few badguys from the classic series whose return does make sense. Pyramids of Mars is a very well-remembered story (not least because it was one of the very first released on VHS), from the most highly-regarded era of the show, but there’s nothing about him which particularly needs to be explained to the new viewer. Partly because he wasn’t invented by Robert Holmes, who was riffing on Hammer Horror versions of the Mummy’s Tomb and flipped through the Big Boys Book of Egyptian Mythology to find the right name. Partly because everything you need to know is right there on the screen.

And, yes, this does feel like the Russell T Davies Stolen Earth/Army of Ghosts/Bad Wolf playbook, with a certain amount of narrative vamping in the early going, and then an acceleration into a mind-blowing reveal at the end. That isn’t a particularly difficult bit of writing, but neither is it trivial, and while this makes it look easy, let’s not overlook some of the grace notes in the writing and the directing. The Time Window is a wonderful device, brilliantly executed. The agony of not quite being able to see the face of Ruby’s mother is exquisite (and just how far away were those security cameras?). The Su-Tech gag is delightful, as is UNIT’s casual dismissal of the S. Triad anagram. All the characters pop – maybe except for Rose who doesn’t get much to do here. But I loved the new 13-year-old scientific advisor and I adored Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together.

But, of course, and by design, this is all build-up and no payoff. And build-up is easier. If this doesn’t all come together next week, that could well tarnish this episode’s reputation. I liked Dark Water a lot more before I’d seen Death in Heaven. But for now, for the ascent to the top of the rollercoaster, this is faultlessly done, with all departments firing on all cylinders, so once again, it’s the full five stars from me.