“There’s such a fine line between “cheese” and “cringe”, is there not?”
“There’s such a fine line between “cheese” and “cringe”, is there not? Come, walk it with me and Tom Hiddleston in Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston. Let’s see how many of us survive the eruptions of embarrassment that attend our journey! This is a National Geographic documentary-drama, which means that even the factual bits are emotionally scripted and there’s CGI money and speaking parts for the re-enactments. And there is Tom (he has looked very deeply into my eyes throughout all three episodes, so I feel we are on first-name terms now), wringing every drop of feeling from every moment with the untrammelled appetite of a born actor.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“In AD79, up to 16,000 people were horribly killed by a pyroclastic surge of rock, gas and lava from the erupting Mount Vesuvius. And now, in further bad news for the poor residents of Pompeii, Tom Hiddleston is wandering around their plaster-cast corpses being cringe. Hiddleston, of Marvel fame, is a historian now. He’s the host of National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston, a new documentary series cut together with dramatic reconstructions, which is also in some ways a secret spin-off for his impish, time-travelling Marvel character Loki. Hiddleston clicks his fingers and rewinds the action throughout, throws computer data into mid-air a la Minority Report or Sherlock Holmes’s mind palace, and halts conversations (“Wait, pause!”) to tell a professor of classics that actually he can speak fluent Latin so can do the translating for him.”
Adam White, The Independent
The Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke, BBC2
“All these people who call themselves influencers - they’re just shysters, all of them, online frauds and fakers peddling their veneers of perfection. We all know it. But how satisfying it is to see proof, when the 1,000-watt facade slips and the nightmare behind the false smile is revealed. I’d never heard of the Frankes or their YouTube channel, though they were apparently famous in the States, a few years ago. But I was engrossed by the US documentary The Devil In The Family: The Fall Of Ruby Franke, which showed footage the parents filmed and didn’t release - glimpses of anger, bitterness, violence and control-freakery they never intended the world to see.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail
No comments yet