True Detective
“Cary Fukunaga’s stunning tracking shot in the fourth episode is up there with Goodfellas or Touch of Evil, and it’s such a powerful example of longform television weaving metatextual clues through its fabric: Rust and Hart are good fellas touching evil.”
“Of course, when you think about it, time is a flat circle, it’s all a matter of perspective. Mind you, Rust did get through a lot of beer. And acid.”
“Well, all the really deep stuff about light v dark was obviously a reference to the inter-dimensional superhero policemen in Alan Moore’s Top 10 – and have you read King in Yellow? Carcosa, the masked nature of our souls – it’s all in there.”
“Everyone says that it’s Magic Mike that saved him, but when you look back, it’s Failure to Launch that really kick-started the McConaissance.”
“Technically, there weren’t any great women characters. But, as the parallel timelines flip back and forth, what you really get is a sense of how it’s exactly that very absence of women in their lives that makes the Cohle/Hart bromance so essential.” RV
Serial
“It’s a remarkable testament to the power of well-crafted storytelling that we were so hooked, but Adnan did it, right? He definitely did it – he had motive, it’s a clear-cut case and if he didn’t, who possibly could have?”
“It’s a remarkable testament to the power of investigative journalism that we were so hooked, because Adnan didn’t do it, right? He couldn’t have done it – he had no motive, it’s a miscarriage of justice and the real question is, who possibly could have?”
“Mail kimp. Mail chimp. HAHAHA. But seriously, they were padding it out by the 10th episode. The time spent trying to work out if there was a phone at Best Buy … come on!”
“The idea that Christina Gutierrez threw the case is ridiculous. But that a jury was forced to listen to her at all is even worse.”
“At first I thought Serial was fascinating. But then I thought, do I? Why does anyone listen to Sarah Koenig? What is Sarah Koenig? And … why?”
Nosheen Iqbal
Kate Bush live
“The emotion exhibited by the audience as she played was quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at a concert before.”
“The playlet in the middle of the Ninth Wave was a little too close to an episode of My Family for comfort, I thought.”
“I’m not sure I fully understood the significance of the bit where a crow-like creature broke through the stage and was battered by backing singers wielding shovels. It was that kind of a show.”
“She sounded absolutely remarkable, I thought, especially given her fondness for the fags in her younger years.”
“You got an awful lot of Kate Bush’s son Bertie for the price of admission, but there are worse things for a mum to suffer from than the sin of pride.”
Alexis Petridis
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
“Of course, in some ways this is a more traditional narrative than his novel Gould’s Book of Fish, which was printed in different coloured inks.”
“The connection to Japanese history and culture is reinforced by the title – it’s taken from a work by Basho, master of haiku.”
“Flanagan is a Tasmanian – which is why he took himself off to an island shack off the Tasmanian coast for six months so that he could finish writing the book.”
“The novel tells the story of the Australians who worked on the Burma Death Railway, one of whom was Flanagan’s father.”
“Thank goodness he won the Man Booker prize – his mum had bet her week’s pension on him winning, and he was thinking of going to work in the mines in north-west Australia if the book hadn’t been a success.”
Alex Clark
Boyhood
“It’s like the movie version of the glass-half-full test. Optimists watch Boyhood and see the child growing up. Pessimists watch Boyhood and see the adults growing old.”
“Other directors are going to hate Richard Linklater after this. The next time they put an actor in ageing makeup or draft in a lookalike, people will say: ‘Why not wait a few decades to shoot the last part of the picture?’”
“The only cast member who wanted to bail out of the process was the director’s own daughter. That’s why the character of Mason’s sister takes a back seat halfway through.”
“Of course, you realise the film is so old it actually inspired Linklater’s Before Sunrise movies, as opposed to the other way around. Linklater started working on Boyhood back in 2001 and that gave him the idea to revisit Celine and Jesse in Before Sunset.”
“In essence, the whole thing is a liberal parable of recent US history. Mason is basically modern America, forged in the heat of 9/11, struggling through the ‘war on terror’ and finding happiness and fulfilment in the age of Obama. No wonder the president says it’s his favourite film of 2014.”
Xan Brooks
• This article was amended on 30 December 2104. The spelling of Christina Gutierrez was incorrect in the original version.
