Vladimir; Hostage

“Vladimir (Netflix) is a quirky campus comedy which requires us to swallow the idea that the gorgeous Rachel Weisz has faded into invisibility upon hitting middle age. She plays an English Literature professor who falls hopelessly in lust with a younger colleague. Weisz is tremendously funny as she navigates this crush while her life unravels. The style of the series takes a bit of getting used to – it’s fourth-wall breaking, with Weisz addressing the camera throughout and speaking in sometimes quite stilted, stagey language. But before long you fall into the rhythm of it. Think of it as Fleabag for 50-somethings.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“Vladimir is that rare visitor to the screen – proper television for proper grownups. The eight-part adaptation of Julia May Jonas’s provocative 2022 debut novel of the same name has not shied away from the properties that made the book great – black comedy, bleak insight, evisceration of accepted pieties – and fitted them perfectly to the new form. The screenwriter, Jeanie Bergen, who has obviously absorbed the book into her very bones, retains all of Jonas’s wit, confidence and, crucially, her willingness to dwell in grey areas and luxuriate in the complexities that govern life in middle age.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Most of the time we are in her head. She teaches a course on women in American fiction. “Bit broad, don’t you think?” she says, overtly signalling the lame pun. This moment is typical of a show that occasionally trips over its own cleverness, but so what? It’s such fun. Awash with academic ego and sexual brinkmanship, it leans into the main character’s obsessiveness and makes us almost complicit in ways that feel naughty, grown-up and sophisticated — quite rare for a Netflix show these days but hugely welcome.”
Ben Dowell, The Times

“The biggest problem that Vladimir faces is the imposition of the Netflix aesthetic standard. The show is packed with recognisable contemporary pop hits (from Chappell Roan to Doechii) and filmed in a colour palette that scorches the retinas. It dulls the edge of iconoclasm that Jonas’s scripts are inching towards. How would Vladimir Nabokov – whose spectre haunts both heroine and author – have forged Humbert Humbert or Charles Kinbote against these creative prescriptions? Vladimir is brisk, easy to watch, and occasionally droll, but any higher aspirations have been brutally muted.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent

“Hero or villain? Good or bad? Popular narrative loves trite binary opposites. One of the reasons that Hostage (BBC2) is such an excellent documentary series is that it digs deep into how complicated and non-binary the John Cantlie story is. How complicated war is.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“So what sort of guy was John Cantlie, the British photographer and reporter who was, most likely, killed by an airstrike in Iraq in 2017, having been kidnapped in Syria in 2012? Hostage spends three episodes trying to work it out. That it does so without the help of Cantlie’s family, who declined to participate, only adds to the feeling that there is much we cannot know. But, particularly in the initial impression given by the opening instalment, this is not the reverent tribute we might expect for a man whose vocation is usually held in high esteem. Cantlie comes across as a maverick who was a danger to himself and to others, as hard to analyse as the brutal chaos he kept throwing himself into.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian