Film and TV round-up: February 2021
Channel 4 start the year with three sharp shows to help you through lockdown, while MUBI continues to fill the gaping hole left by the closure of arthouse cinemas Article by Jamie Dunn | 02 Feb 2021
MUBI has always been cinephile nirvana, but as skittish studios continue to shunt their glitziest arthouse titles off to a hopefully COVID-free future (
Another Round,
Promising Young Woman and
Nomadland were some of the films we’d originally planned to review this month before they retreated at the 11th hour) this streaming platform’s continued rollout of sparkling filmmaking from around the world is more appreciated than ever.
Alan Tudyk crash-lands to Earth and steals the first body he finds in an amusing sci-fi drama. Plus: Inside Culture With Mary Beard. Here’s what to watch this evening
Channel 4’s Back knows the provincial pub is Britain in microcosm This comedy series starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb also has deep feeling for its boozer’s denizens. In the new series of
Back Stephen (David Mitchell) has left the residential hospital where he was being treated for the breakdown induced by his dastardly foster brother Andrew (Robert Webb), and has returned to the family pub, the John Barleycorn. Is he better? This isn’t clear. It’s hard to see beyond the misanthropy, which is fully intact, in spite of the therapy. Either way, he remains an utter chump. Aiming for chumminess with a delivery man, he tries to mimic the shaking of dice with his hands. But he can’t even get this right. I’m not going to use the w-word in my first paragraph, but the hard-to-misinterpret gesture in question has to do with, you know, self-pleasure.
a Sin arrived complete with ready-made culture row, creator Russell T Davies having done a little stoking by saying heâd like gay men to be played by gay actors. Cue huffing in predictable quarters, chiefly along these lines: would Hannibal Lecter need to then be played by a convicted cannibal? An argument I normally like to consign to the category âtechnically valid, but you might want to grow up a bit and have a wee word with yourselvesâ. And to let this particular tower of babble overshadow any of the subsequent creation would indeed be a sin.
It is, on the evidence of the first episode (of five), mainly a joyous, gleeful, rambunctious watch, shot through with historical experience and period perfection, even if Manchesterâs Clampdown Records is, last time I looked, rather far from Savile Row. So Ritchie, Roscoe, Welsh Colin and Glaswegian Gloria, all, to a greater or far lesser extent, flamboyant and fleeing homes mired in stultifying early 80s orthodoxy and