16/27
Starring: Graham Norton and guests: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)
Helen begins a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to the dangerous London underworld, Helen’s employer calls Sam to protect her. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam gets his guns, is played by Rat Scabies of The Damned.
A New York Tale Written by: Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Performed by: The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl
This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot, but ultimately fell short of all it could have. With a top-notch cast including Keira Knightley as a ninja-kicking, gun-toting action heroine and Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both are members of a top-secret mercenary spy organisation called Black Doves, run by Sarah Lancashire, who does her best to impersonate Judi Dench "M" in a hideous platinum blonde wig.
The trio have been working together, but alone, trying to uncover some grand conspiracy
It certainly starts with a bang as we see three young people murdered in central London. There’s a separate plot thread surrounding the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose party-minded daughter has also inconveniently disappeared, threatening all sorts of international political strife. It’s no surprise that these two developments come close later on, with both stories overlapping with Knightley and Whishaw’s, not least because, as well as marrying the government’s defence secretary, she herself has been caught up in the political fallout over the ambassador’s death, and she herself has had a passionate affair with one of the three initially murdered.
By the time everything was resolved at the end, I felt it fell somewhere between James Bond-style fantasy and Le Carre-style realism, and escapism unfortunately ultimately won out
other characters are drawn into the kaleidoscopic narrative as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper into an increasingly inscrutable plot, with a mountain-sized body count piling up around and around them, occasionally in their hands, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance. Sharply directed, with authentic performances from an A-list cast of stars, it somehow failed to deliver on its early promise for me, floundering on an overwrought plot that relied too much on coincidence, gunplay, and strange, offbeat characters. When I started watching, I felt that Almost at first, the over-the-top take on all the remaining episodes seemed good, but I’m afraid the cracks were starting to show around episode 4, which no amount of sharp dialogue and quick jokes could compensate for (and there were some good ones in there).
The tense and exciting ending picked up again, even if it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t seem to know when to stop
However, it eventually managed to pull through, and even did so with a “Die Hard”-style Christmas tie-in, but ultimately it all felt a little too contrived, convoluted, and confusing to really work for me. No need to waste any more time scrolling through — here’s the full lineup of new movies and TV shows streaming on Netflix this month.
https://ghg.sd/2024/11/19/baldurs-gate-3-deluxe-repack-dodi-edition-digital-download-via-torrent/
