Author: Andres Kabel

Much anticipated because of Anthony Doerr’s brilliant novel, All the Light We Cannot See, a four-part streamer series, commences with one of its many sweeping wartime set pieces, as Allied forces bomb a Nazi-occupied French village and we see a teenage girl broadcasting from an attic room. The girl fled Paris earlier with her father, a museum curator who rescued and hid a precious jewel, and now the father is gone. Enter a young German radio operator (played with intensity by Louis Hofmann), brilliant at his craft and repulsed by his Nazi overlords. Enter a reptilian Nazi jewel hunter (Lars Eidinger is the only actor to imbue the many Nazi villains with any malevolent heft and he does it with style). The three inexorably wend their way to confrontations, amidst numerous flashbacks filling out the tale. The underlying book embraced huge themes of inhumanity, hope, and redemption through culture, and it did so with grave grace. The film’s arc captures the book’s tale faithfully, and it brings war’s kaleidoscopic horrors to stunning life, but the script is pedestrian and many actors are miscast. The music, by stalwart James Newton Howard, is old school strings and is execrable. Overall, All the Light We Cannot See is passable lush entertainment but utterly fails to do the book justice.

I had firmly believed my diet of books trumped that of movies/shows, especially when examined over a full year, especially when considering the best of the best. Not this year. Although my reading included gems, my viewing teemed with excellent and indeed magnificent offerings. Any of the following would reward your attention.

Follow the links below to my reviews.

The adaptation of Hugh Howey’s wonderful dystopian sci-fi series that began with Wool is wondrously atmospheric, superbly acted, and utterly unpredictable from episode to episode. Ten-episode Silo (10/10) probably tops the year.

Season 2 of The Bear (10/10) rivals Silo in excellence. Just as frenetic, deeply characterized, and riveting as Season 1. If you love food, even if you only love movies, treat yourself to these ten episodes.

Succession Season 4 (10/10)—need I say anything at all?

This first season of Slow Horses was most welcome but the second season (10/10)—perfection, the spy thriller outing you must see! (And I’m currently partway through Season 3!)

An arthouse father-daughter drama of immense emotional heft, Scrapper (10/10) might be the best 2023 film you’ll typically never hear of.

Rachel Antony & Laurence Billiet’s hypnotic, scary, inspiring documentary about both Bob Brown, the legendary Greens politician, and the beauty of Tasmania’s forests, The Giants (10/10) was hands down the most impressive documentary of the year.

Blockbuster it might have been, but Christopher Nolan’s transfixing Oppenheimer (10/10) deserves all its praise.

A completely different film was feminist crime fiction drama Deadloch (10/10) by Kate McCartney & Kate McLennan. Funny, tense, and affecting.

To learn so much about creativity, intelligence, idealism, and persistence, you can’t go past Turn Every Page (9/10), which gently portrays master biographer Robert Caro and master editor Robert Gottlieb.

Season 2 of The Newsreader surpassed the superb first season and exemplifies Australian drama.

I have Holly Ringland’s novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart in my Audible audiobook library, gifted by Amazon as part of a membership, but I never began to listen. Now I don’t need to, in a sense, because a seven-episode series, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, pulses with foreboding and drama. Set in rural Australia, the tale begins with nine-year-old Alice scarred by a terrible fire consuming her parents and ending up on her grandmother’s flower farm (the film is scattered with flower arrangements and their hidden meanings), which doubles as a women’s refuge from domestic violence. The first episode, depicting the initial horrors, is brilliant, and indeed the first half of the series, based around the young Alice, is the better portion. Sparkling acting—Alyla Browne and Alycia Debnam-Carey as the young and adult Alice, Sigourney Weaver as the secretive Grandma, the hypnotic Charlie Vickers as the abusive father, and a number of supporting actors—form the core of the show’s emotional wallop, aided by Hania Rani’s wonderful film score. As I implied, the second half, witnessing Alice unpacking the secrets surrounding her life, sags a little, but the final payoff, in the final episode, is superb. Recommended.

Fans of “noir” will, I hazard a guess, have varying interpretations on what this specialized genre (as distinct from a general label indicating “hardboiled” or “tough”) strictly comprises but no one would doubt that David Fincher’s new, focussed film, The Killer, starring a perfectly cast Michael Fassbender, is as noir as it gets. Intimately fixated in the gaze and mind of a longtime professional assassin, full of voiceovers of his rules of life and conduct, from the opening scene when our killer is waiting for his mark to arrive in a Paris apartment, we are aware all normal constraints of morality are out the window. The assassin’s philosophy is plainly practical and void of humanity, and, as is customary for this genre, the fascination lies in observing such a sociopath operating, in using such a sociopath as a lens to explore notions of good and evil. The film’s plot conceit is simple and classical: after a botched job, killers come from our killer and our killer embarks on a patient, unstoppable vendetta. Fincher is superb with long action scenes, fascinating in their vulgar expression of killing modes, and Fassbender plays the part to perfection. The notion of a disintegrating personality, also de rigeur for noir, is played with, but without any real sense of plotting purposefulness, and the end of the film can feel inconclusive, but like all noir fans, I watched The Killer for the uneasy, troubling vibe (coupled with thriller-level antics) and found it to be riveting.

What a rollicking delight, rocking with madcap humor while also suffused with classic Coen-Brothers-style dread, is Deadloch! Beset with a headline label of “feminist noir comedy,” and roaring with sharp wit, we embark on eight jam-packed, tightly choreographed (in the best tradition of twisty, twisty murder mysteries) episodes. A visually stunning Tasmanian town is plunged into terror when male bodies are found with identical gruesome MOs, and the task of righting wrongs falls to steady-as-she-goes local policewoman Dulcie Collins (brilliantly played by Kate Box) and a crass, swearing, visiting hoon cop, Eddie Redcliffe from Darwin (portrayed completely over the top by Madeleine Sami in a way that also endears). A huge cast of eccentric characters swirls around Dulcie and Eddie as they seek a killer. The early slapstick tone darkens toward the end, without ever relinquishing a guffaw or a chuckle, and the crime plot is flawlessly executed, guaranteed to fool every watcher. Written by TV comedians Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan, Deadloch is a oncer, a mix of genre magic and feminist truth-talking and genius humor. A winner.

The cascade of Michael Connelly offerings—books and series—featuring either perennial Harry Bosch or newer Mickey Haller or Renee Ballard, can be hard to keep up with. What astounds me is how consistently excellent, within its chosen crime fiction genre, all the output is. Bosch: Legacy spins off from Bosch the driven homicide detective, now driven private investigator, and increasingly focuses on Maddie, Bosch’s daughter, a fresh cop in the LAPD. Madison Lintz flawlessly captures the young woman through initial travails, and into her early career, as she inevitably morphs into her father’s implacable, violence-soaked character. In Season 2, Maddie is kidnapped in a terrifying first scene and we spend a few episodes as Bosch endeavors to rescue her before it is too late. Blowback from Season 1, featuring two newish and engaging characters—super-lawyer Honey Chandler and hip hacker Mo Bassi—threatens Bosch, and a defence case plunges them all into the web spun by rogue cops (with Max Martini in particular playing a terrific part). Midway through this season, I wondered (as I often do) if the Bosch lineage is coming to a useful end, but then the final episodes steamed ahead, and I was left shaking my head in enjoyable amazement. Another fine series.