gripping

The recently released Griselda stands out as one of Netflix's highly anticipated shows of 2024, providing a compelling lead in Sofia Vergara. The actress, known for her remarkable small-screen performances, as expected, delivered another noteworthy act in the series. Netflix's Must-Watch Crime Shows(Instagram) (Also Read: Christopher Nolan opens up on his responsibility to keep making large-scale movies) Catch the complete coverage of Budget 2024 only on HT. Explore now! Viewers who appreciate the gritty and…

My earliest reading memoryBecause I grew up in Stockholm, it’s not surprising that my earliest literary memories should revolve around Astrid Lindgren. The first novel I ever read may have been Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter.My favourite book growing upThroughout my childhood I was obsessed with Tintin. It was clear to me even then that these books were problematic (of the ones I had, Prisoners of the Sun, in particular, angered me), but they were also gorgeous and gripping. And their most magical quality was that, despite…

An author, podcaster and journalist, Yomi Adegoke is well placed to explore the permutations of Black British celebrity culture in the digital age. She co-wrote the bestselling self-help manual Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible in 2018 and made the Forbes 30 under 30 list three years later.The power of social media to make and break you is the subject of her much-anticipated debut novel. Ola and Michael are a young, Insta-famous couple, “the king and queen of #BlackLove”. One month before their wedding, a roll call…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM The Covenant of Water (Courtesy: The Author) When I think about literary dads, it’s the single fathers I think about. Like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird who inspires his children by example. And Abel from Kane and Abel who brings up his daughter Florentyna to dream big, to start a business empire and run for the highest office in the land. My favourite fictional father is yet another single dad - a man who walks his son through the grey grimness of a dystopian world, desperately…

There’s passion in this heartrending documentary from film-maker Paul Sng, comparable to his excellent earlier film about Poly Styrene, of X-Ray Spex. It is about the Tyneside photographer Tish Murtha who chronicled working-class lives in the north east in the 70s and 80s (and also those of Soho sex workers in London), earning for herself the nickname “Demon Snapper” in the papers.She showed the reality of poverty and deprivation in communities where the misery of unemployment had been allowed to settle by the Westminster…

As we head towards 2030, a terrible realisation is dawning on us – that we have built a world that is critically dependent on a set of technologies that almost nobody understands, and which are also extremely fragile and insecure. Fancy Bear Goes Phishing seeks to tackle both sides of this dilemma: our collective ignorance, on the one hand, and our insecurity on the other. Its author says that he embarked on the project seeking an understanding of just three things. Why is the internet so insecure? How (and why) do the…

Savagely cinematic, charged with feral energy and exploring a story that dances between muddy realism and a mythic, quasi-magical abandon, Pamfir would be impressive even if it hadn’t been made in Ukraine on the cusp of conflict. But the setting – the lawless, forested border country – and the snapshot of a moment just before the war tore through the region makes this doubly fascinating.Reformed smuggler Pamfir (a wonderful, full-blooded performance from Oleksandr Yatsentyuk) returns to his village for the annual Malanka…

It’s a charged word, terrorism. It’s unsettling, challenging, alarming. And this is something that Daniel Goldhaber’s propulsive eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline smartly acknowledges. Even on the eve of a radical act of violent protest – the destruction of two sections of Texas’s oil infrastructure – some of the environmental activists behind the plan are reluctant to use the term. Rowan (Kristine Froseth), a 22-year-old from Portland, Oregon, prefers to think of herself as a “revolutionary” or “gamechanger”. Other…

Here is a standalone feature film and final capstone in Netflix’s British-made TV series The Last Kingdom, an epic in every sense of the word that’s based on novels by Bernard Cornwell and unfolds in the 10th century, just before the Norman invasion. Even if you’ve never seen a single episode from any of the show’s previous five seasons of dramatised yet highly researched British history, you’ll probably quite like to go back and start watching the whole saga from the beginning because it gets more gripping the more you…

Boris Becker was the poster-boy of 1980s tennis, the 17-year-old upstart who turned Wimbledon on its head. He possessed a howitzer serve, a gambler’s swagger and a habit – at once exhilarating and alarming – of diving full-length in pursuit of seemingly irretrievable balls. No match was complete without the sight of Becker crashing to the ground like a cold-cocked prizefighter. Most times, he bounced straight back to his feet.In 2018, the Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney – a keen player himself – began preparing a…