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‘murdaugh murders’ is timely but doesn’t make much of a case for watching it.
Landing on Netflix as the trial of Alex Murdaugh continues , “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” will certainly benefit from its timeliness, but this three-part production isn’t as compelling as its subject matter. Relying almost entirely on those involved to tell the story, the project has a slapdash feel from beginning to end, and finds the younger contingent, especially, to be poor narrators of what transpired.
Indeed, if ever a true-crime docuseries would have benefited from using a narrator, it’s this one; instead, the producers let the group of friends who were swept up in the tragic boat accident that claimed the life of 19-year-old Mallory Beach drone on, augmenting their accounts with blurry reenactments that look like something out of a cheap horror movie.
Although the title “Murdaugh Murders” ostensibly references the killing of Paul Murdaugh and his mother, Maggie, which resulted in his father and her husband, Alex, being put on trial, that’s something of an afterthought in the way the episodes are constructed. The focus of the first two parts, rather, centers on the boat crash.
Those who were on board speak of Paul, who often drank excessively, driving the boat, and the Murdaugh family – thanks to patriarch Alex, a well-connected South Carolina attorney – allegedly using its wealth and influence over the authorities to protect him.
As the details gradually come out, there are other inconsistencies and allegations about occasions where the Murdaughs escaped scrutiny in the face of suspicious events, including the death of a housekeeper and nanny, Gloria Satterfield , who, they claimed, was seriously injured when the family dog caused her to fall down a flight of stairs.
“Murdaugh Murders” features interviews with several key figures, including Paul’s girlfriend, Morgan Doughty; Mallory Beach’s friends Miley Altman and Connor Cook; and Mallory’s boyfriend, Anthony Cook. Yet the most illuminating information comes from an attorney for Beach’s family, Mark Tinsley, who lays out evidence of incidents when the Murdaughs allegedly received special treatment from the authorities, which goes beyond Paul avoiding consequences for the fatal boating accident.
Sometimes it’s simply enough to be in the right place at the right time, and based on the success Netflix has enjoyed with the true-crime genre, often built around family tragedies , having a docuseries ready to go as Alex Murdaugh’s trial commands headlines falls squarely into that basket even if it is, by its very nature, chasing a moving target. What “Murdaugh Murders” doesn’t do, ultimately, is make much of a case for watching it.
“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” premieres February 22 on Netflix.
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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Under Suspicion: Uncovering The Wesphael Case’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About A Belgian Politician On Trial For Killing His Wife
Where to stream:.
- Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case
Stream It Or Skip It: 'Who Killed Robert Wone?' on Peacock, A Maddening Whodunit That Will Keep You Up at Night
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On October 31, 2013, Véronique Pirotton was found dead in a hotel room in Ostend, Belgium. Her husband, Bernard Wesphael, claimed it was suicide. He went on trial for manslaughter for her death, for which he was eventually acquitted. Because of the fact that this was the only the second time a member of parliament went on trial for his wife’s death, a media frenzy was sparked in Belgium. The story of the case is examined in Under Suspicion: Uncovering The Wesphael Case .
UNDER SUSPICION: UNCOVERING THE WESPHAEL CASE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Mons, Belgium. October 6, 2016. The day of the verdict in the manslaughter trial of Bernard Wesphael, a member of the Belgian parliament. There are people lined up down the hall.
The Gist: The first episode dives right into the case, talking to Pirotton’s sister and cousin about the marital problems she was having with Wesphael, about how the pair married quickly and that he didn’t seem like her type. Pirotton decided to get some alone time in Ostend while Wesphael looked for an apartment where he could live while they were separated.
It’s then when Wesphael appears on screen, and picks up the story from there, explaining that he joined her in Ostend and the two of them made passionate love that night. Was he lying? Not according to “earwitnesses” who were staying in the rooms next door and below where Wesphael and Pirotton were staying. If Wesphael is to be believed, the next day Pirotton went back and forth in emotions between Wesphael and a lover she was texting with named Oswald. He also sent him one message or multiple messages, depending on who you ask, but the message was interpreted as a threat.
After having a few too many, Wesphael carries Pirotton back to their room, where they have a row that the earwitnesses describe as sounding very distressing. He falls asleep, then wakes to see Pirotton sprawled on the bathroom floor with a bag on her head.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? More or less any true crime series on Netflix, but this time the accused is speaking out instead of the accuser.
Our Take: Creators Georges Huercano and Pascal Vrebos and director Alain Brunard took a different approach with Under Suspicion: Uncovering The Wesphael Case than most recent true crime docuseries directors have. Instead of building with backstory, to try to inform audiences about the case’s central characters, they jump right into the case. Doing so makes the first episode more eventful than most in this genre, but it also makes things a bit more confusing, too.
Now, if we lived in Belgium or some of its neighbors, we might have had more foreknowledge of the Wesphael case, and would have been able to make this leap with the filmmakers. But coming in from the outside, it’s hard to grab the thread of who Wesphael is, what his personality is, and why the much-younger Priotton fell for him. It’s also hard to discern where the relationship went wrong. From Wesphael’s accounts, it felt like just a matter of Priotton being torn between him and Oswald. But her relatives paint a bleaker picture.
That’s the rub here. We’re going to need to find out more about the background of the case before we can get into the investigation and trial. Perhaps that’s what the filmmakers’ intention is. We see Wesphael, an egoist at best and a narcissist at worst, praising how nice he looked when he went to meet his wife in Ostend, despite her insistence that she wanted space. Priotton writes a long letter to her son Victor about separating from his stepfather, but then tells Wesphael that she’s off birth control because she wants to have a baby with him (at least according to him).
So we have some claims of abuse and other serious accusations from Priotton’s family and then a lengthy testimony from Wesphael that sounds more like a romance novel than anything real. We also have the smarminess of listening to neighboring guests talking about the sex noises they made, then the loud screaming that followed. It all feels unseemly and not very cohesive. But Wesphael has such a raging ego we want to see him explain this incident away for the entire five-episode series.
Sex and Skin: Except for the hotel neighbors talking about all the “pleasuring,” there was nothing.
Parting Shot: One of the earwitnesses said something thuddingly obvious: “Something happened in that room to cause that woman to die. And I’d like to hear from him his side of the story.
Sleeper Star: We felt bad for the kids of both sets of earwitnesses who had to hear these odd and off-putting noises coming from the walls of an old hotel that seems to have pretty thin walls, floors and ceilings.
Most Pilot-y Line: Wesphael dominates the last 20 or so minutes of the 35-minute first episode, and that felt completely unbalanced to us.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite our reservations, Under Suspicion: Uncovering The Wesphael Case introduces us to someone whose ego is so immense it makes our just-departed president look like a shrinking violet in comparison. And we’re hooked.
Should you stream or skip the docuseries #UnderSuspicion : Uncovering The Wesphael Case on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) March 24, 2021
Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Stream Under Suspicion: Uncovering The Wesphael Case On Netflix
- Stream It Or Skip It
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Dec 5, 2020
Customer Reviews Analysis using NLP — The Netflix Use Case
In the era of digitalization, most companies have various sources of customer feedback, social media, call logs, mobile apps, to name a few. Therefore, analyzing such feedback to come up with actionable insights, is becoming essential for any business with an online presence.
1. Introduction
Some of the challenges businesses face while analyzing customers' feedback is the qualitative nature of the data and sometimes the huge amount of feedback they get. Ratings are quantitative and hence can be easily analyzed, however analyzing textual feedback, reviews, and free text is challenging. Likely, today we have Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to efficiently process a large amount of text without human intervention.
There are mainly two approaches that can be used to find topics in text data, Topic Modeling, or Text Clustering. In this tutorial, we will go through some techniques and ideas about the two approaches and try to understand what people are talking about in mobile app reviews. We will start by fetching some reviews data, taking as an example the Netflix's mobile app, then we will apply a series of preprocessing techniques to prepare the data for topic detection.
2. Data Preparation
In the following analysis, I used a dataset of 5000 recent reviews from the Netflix mobile app on Google Play. The following figure shows the daily number of reviews with a score of 1, it gives us an idea about the amount of data we are dealing with.
We can also look at the review length distribution. As we can see, usually people submit short to medium size reviews (under 50 words).
I used a maximum length of 48 words for all reviews, longer reviews are discarded from the dataset.
3. Data Preprocessing
Text preprocessing is an important step for natural language processing. It transforms text into a more digestible and usable form so that machine learning algorithms can perform better.
In our case, I applied the following transformation:
- Remove URLs, emails, phone numbers & punctuations.
- Remove tags, emojis, symbols & pictographs.
- Remove stop words.
- Convert to lowercase and lemmatization.
- Duplicates removal.
- Spell checking.
- Non-English reviews removal.
Once preprocessing is done, we can look at a random review example.
4. Reviews Topics Modeling
In topic modeling, a topic is defined by a cluster of words with their respective probabilities of occurrence in the cluster. The goal is to find the topics in a set of documents, without having prior knowledge about those topics. In most cases, we only need to specify the number of topics and leave the rest of the algorithms.
4.1 Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
Probably the most popular topic modeling approach, it treats each document (text) as a mixture of topics, and each word in a document is considered randomly drawn from the document’s topics. The topics are considered hidden (thus the ‘Latent’ in the name) which must be uncovered through analyzing joint distribution to compute the conditional distribution of hidden variables (topics) given the observed variables, words in documents. This takes into consideration the fact that documents can have an overlap of topics which is somehow a typical case in the natural language.
I performed LDA for topic modeling using the amazing library gensim, and also use it to tokenize the data and prepare dictionary and bag-of-words features.
In order to have a good LDA model, we need to find a suitable number of topics that give good quality topics. One of the commonly used approaches to evaluate topics is measuring the Topic Coherence, it’s a single score by topic where it measures the degree of semantic similarity between high scoring words in the topic. These measurements help distinguish between topics that are semantically interpretable and topics that are artifacts of statistical inference. I used C_v measure which is based on a sliding window, one-set segmentation of the top words, and an indirect confirmation measurement that uses normalized pointwise mutual information (NPMI) and the cosine similarity. Read more about coherence measures here .
I ran multiple LDA models with different numbers of topics and picked the one with the highest score. We could also finetune other hyperparameters like document-topic density (alpha) or word-topic density (beta), however, I keep it simple and only finetune the number of topics.
We pick the number of topics with the highest coherence score: K=30
As we can see, we got many topics related to technical issues about the app, controversies, and people not satisfied with the app. we will dig deeper into the clusters in the next approaches.
Despite its popularity and usefulness in the context of medium and large documents, LDA generally performs poorly with short documents. In our case, reviews are generally short texts (> 50 word) with typically one topic, which is not necessary LDA’s assumption. In order to solve this issue, we will try out a Short Text Topic Modeling.
4.2. Short Text Topic Modeling
In order to model topics in short texts, we use an altered LDA approach called Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Mixture Model (GSDMM) where the main assumptions are :
- Each document corresponds to only one topic.
- The words in a document are generated using one unique topic.
The GSDMM model can be explained with a process called the Movie Group Process, where a professor is leading a film class and students are randomly seated at K table. Students are asked to make a shortlist of their favorite movies and each time a student is called, he or she must select a new table regarding the two following conditions:
- The new table has more students than the current table.
- The new table has students with similar lists of favorite movies.
After repeating this process consistently, we expect that the students eventually arrive at an optimal table configuration. where some tables will disappear and others to grow larger to form clusters of students with similar movies’ interests.
We adapt rwalk’s implementation for our STTM.
we start with a K = 30 number of topics and let GSDMM find the optimal number of topics.
Similar to LDA, STTM did a good job in highlighting the main topics.
5. Reviews Categorization using Text Clustering
In this section, we will look into how Text Clustering can help with detecting topics and categorizing reviews. In clustering, the idea is to group documents, with potentially semantic similarities, into different groups. First, we represent each document with a numerical vector in a way similar documents should have closer vectors in the space (using a similarity metric). We will test out different approaches, from classic ones like tf-idf to recent and advanced ones around the idea of documents embedding.
5.1 Features & Embeddings Extraction
A. tf-idf & lda.
TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency — Inverse Document Frequency and is have been explained in many articles and tutorials in the data science community, but I will remaind you of the main formula :
tfidf(w,d,D)=tf(w,d)∗idf(w,D)tfidf(w,d,D)=tf(w,d)∗idf(w,D)
with : tf(w,d)=log(1+f(w,d))tf(w,d)=log(1+f(w,d)) and idf(w,D)=log(N/f(w,D))idf(w,D)=log(N/f(w,D))
- f(w,d) is the frequency of word w in document d.
- d is a document from our dataset
- w is a word in a document
- D is the collection of all documents
- N is the number of documents we have in our dataset
An other way to vectorize document is to use LDA features where each vector represent the probabilities of belonging to a topic. We fix number of topics to 20, for example, to have 20-dim vector for each review text item.
Sklearn made it easy to calculate TFIDF and LDA features.
b. Embeddings
Embeddings are low-dimensional learned continuous vector representations for words, sentences, or documents. They can be used in many use cases like finding similar documents, do machine learning on text, and visualizing text and relationships.
For our use case, we want to represent reviews as vectors representation to be able to apply clustering algorithms to detect topics. Reviews are usually short sentences, thus, we should look for a suitable embedding approach for this situation.
Here is the list of the approaches I have tested :
- Sentence Transformers using BERT .
- Vanilla BERT: CLS token as an embedding, Averaging last hidden layer outputs as an embedding, Averaging the concatenation of last hidden layers outputs as an embedding
- Facebook’s InferSent : using GloVe or using FastText
We will use the first approach with the model bert-large-nli-stsb-mean-tokens , as it showed the best performance in general.
In order to visualize the chosen embeddings, we should use a dimensionality reduction approach to represent reviews in the 2D space. We have many options like PCA, t-SNE, TriMap, AutoEncoders, and UMAP. I tried most of those techniques, but I will stick with UMAP as it’s is a dimension reduction technique that is gaining a lot of popularity recently.
We reduced the embeddings to 16 for better clustering, and we will use a 2-dimension reduction for the visualization.
5.2 Clustering embeddings
Once features are ready, we can proceed with applying clustering algorithms to hopefully detect relevant topics in our reviews dataset. As we don’t know the number of topics, we will avoid using k-means, where it’s always programmatically difficult to find the best K, and usually performs poorly if the assumptions on the shape of the clusters aren't met.
As an alternative, we will use HDBSCAN (Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) which is a density-based clustering algorithm. HDBSCAN extends DBSCAN by converting it into a hierarchical clustering algorithm and then using a technique to extract a flat clustering based on the stability of clusters.
We can summarize how HDBSCAN algorithm works in the following steps:
- Transform the space according to the density/sparsity via building the minimum spanning tree from the mutual reachability distances.
- Construct a cluster hierarchy of connected components
- Condense and extract the stable clusters from the condensed tree
To learn more about HDBSCAN, check this detailed article . Likely, we have a high performing implementation of HDBSCAN clustering that we can use to do our clustering.
HDBSCAN has a couple of major parameters that we need to tune to get good clusters. we will focus on two main parameters, min_cluster_size which should be set to the smallest cluster size that we wish to consider, and min_samples measures how clusters are conservative to the noisy points. You can read more about parameter selection for HDBSAN here .
Let’s fix those parameters and run the HDBSCAN on the embeddings. We choose min_cluster_size = 40 and min_samples = 10 .
Now we can visualize the embeddings in a 2D space with their associated clusters to have an idea of how the clusters are dense.
In order to better evaluate clusters and highlight the best coherent ones, we will sort them by size (i.e, the number of reviews in a cluster), and the median outlier score for the items in the clusters. this score can be found in the attribute outlier_scores_ in the clusterer object. it provides a value for each sample in the original dataset that was fit with the clusterer. The higher the score, the more likely the point is to be an outlier. Let’s explore the results! we remove the clustering representing the noisy points and order the clusters by their size or how dense they are.
The figure shows the word cloud for each cluster detected by HDBSCAN, the title contains the cluster/topic number, the percentage, and the number of reviews belonging to that topic.
Few insights from the clusters :
- The biggest two clusters, (Topics 20,22) representing around 16% of all reviews, are related to the topic of boycott and controversy around the French movie ‘Cuties’.
- Another prominent cluster (Topic 35) is related to people experiencing issues when they open the Netflix app, especially after installing some updates.
- Topic 18 is mainly about people leaving negative reviews about the content on Netflix.
- Another recurrent issue reported many times is when the video freezes after a certain number of seconds.
- A lot of reviews are related to hurting Hindu sentiments and promoting propaganda. Apparently, it's about another controversy caused by Netflix.
- In some clusters, people are asking about more movies that aren't currently available on Netflix, many of them are related to Bollywood movies.
- We can see many topics related to technical issues about the app: Issues with login, a black screen when playing a video, app crashing after the start, payments can’t be processed, people requesting other payment methods (Rupay), video/audio isn’t working properly…
5. Conclusion
As we have seen, Natural language processing can be very useful when it comes to customer feedback understanding. We have used topic modeling and text clustering to detect relevant topics in Netflix Android app reviews from Google Play. All mentioned approaches can be improved further via more hyperparameters finetuning. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn .
Originally published here .
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Case (original title: Réttur ) is an Icelandic crime-drama TV series created by Andri Óttarsson and Þorleifur Örn Arnarsson, and directed by Baldvin Z that was released on Netflix on October 18, 2015, and concluded on December 20, 2015. This series is about a lawyer's life going downhill, but he would try to save himself when the tragedy of the suicide of a teenage ballet turns sinister.
- 2 Main Cast and Characters
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Summary [ ]
Main cast and characters [ ].
- Steinunn Ólína Þorsteinsdóttir as Gabríela
- Magnús Jónsson as Logi
- Birna Rún Eiríksdóttir as Hanna
- Elma Stefania Agustsdottir as Ilmur
- Bergur Þór Ingólfsson as Jónas
- Jóhanna Vigdís Arnardóttir as Brynhildur
- Þorsteinn Bachmann as Högni
- Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as Guðný
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This series received 2 wins and 6 nominations.
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2009, Horror/Mystery & thriller, 1h 49m
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Director Christian Alvert has a certain stylish flair, but it's wasted on Case 39 's frightless, unoriginal plot. Read critic reviews
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- Rating: R (Violence and Terror|Disturbing Images)
- Genre: Horror, Mystery & thriller
- Original Language: English
- Director: Christian Alvart
- Producer: Steve Golin , Kevin Misher
- Writer: Ray Wright
- Release Date (Theaters): Oct 1, 2010 wide
- Release Date (Streaming): Jan 4, 2011
- Box Office (Gross USA): $13.2M
- Runtime: 1h 49m
- Distributor: Paramount Pictures
- Sound Mix: SDDS, Dolby Digital, DTS
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- Apr 26, 2015 The strangely enticing opportunity to see comedic actress Renée Zellwegger as the stressed and confused foster parent of a contemporary Omen child cant save the disappointment that is met upon finishing the film. Unfortunately, Case 39 just isn't very memorable whatsoever. Alot of the scenes featured in the picture such as the repetetive circling on an office chair by the demonic child become quite grating and annoying. Whilst the film does have its fair share of genuinely intriguing twists and turns (the Hornets scene for example) and the performance by the young Jodelle Ferland is gripping enough to attain our attention throughout the duration, the film is generally a letdown. Super Reviewer
- May 19, 2013 While a Zellweger fan (and she does well here) this story about innocent looking and acting DEMON CHILD! has been done before and better, and hoping and wishing for a new wrinkle here won't make it real. Ahh, well ... better luck next time. Super Reviewer
- Jun 14, 2012 Edward Sullivan: They say when you're born you're given your eternal soul. The part of you that lives on, lives again. Whatever evil she is,didn't come from us. It was already there. From the moment she came into being, she brought something with her. Something older, destructive. Soul of a demon. "Some cases should never be opened." Not as terrible as I expected, but I expected the worst. Case 39 is still just recycled parts from better evil kid horror movies, like The Bad Seed and Orphan. It ends up playing like a more entertaining form of The Good Son. It also has a lot of things that just don't add up when examined closely, but that is the least of its problems. The biggest problem the film has is that its target audience is going to hate it and find it repetitive in the least. The target audience for this film are the people who enjoy the evil kid horror genre. And guess what; we've seen them all. So this isn't going to cut it. When you try to make a movie like this, you have to come up with something new, strange, and terrifying to add to the formula. If you can't, the result will be a failure, like Case 39. The sweetness of the little girl is played off terribly. I don't know if that is a result of her acting skills or bad writing. It may just be a combination of the two. To be honest though, the movie does have a decent start. It all goes downhill quickly though, because the writing is terrible and stuff just doesn't add up. Why would the little girl be afraid of telling the social workers about her situation because the father gives her a nasty look? She's the evil one. I know we aren't supposed to know that then, but damn have some foresight in your fucking script. There is some entertainment value in the movies awfulness. I can say I was never bored by the movie. I can also say that a lot of the entertainment I got from it came from me laughing at the ridiculousness of some of the scenes. I could talk about everything I hated in the movie, but that would take all day. Let's just leave it by saying it's bad. Maybe if you have never seen another movie in the sub genre, you will find it intriguing; but if you have, I would suggest skipping it. Super Reviewer
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The Staircase review – still the godfather of the true crime documentary
Netflix’s doc about the death of Kathleen Peterson and her novelist husband Michael’s court case remains a sensational, game-changing series
I n December 2001, Kathleen Peterson, who was married to the 58-year-old novelist Michael Peterson, was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their mansion in Durham, North Carolina. Peterson said his wife had fallen, but he was tried for murder. Those bare facts are intriguing, but they are just a tiny part of why The Staircase is a crime documentary to rival any of the genre’s biggest hits.
Netflix’s 13-parter comprises eight episodes released in 2004, another two that debuted in 2013 – up to this point, it has all been shown before on BBC4 – and three new instalments, shot last year. Taken in one hit, it is what Netflix justifiably calls a titanic piece of work that confirms the French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade as the godfather of the modern longform documentary. You can see why the producers of Making a Murderer sought advice from De Lestrade when they began editing their show: The Staircase demonstrates how to ride the wave of a sensational true story, zooming in on fine details before pulling back to unleash game-changing revelations at the steady rate of one stunner per episode.
Both series dismantle the American justice system, but The Staircase shows it to be not so much corrupt as inexact. It is soon clear that the absolute truth of whether Peterson did it is unlikely to be revealed: the question is whether his lawyers can get him off. We see every grubby facet of that process, including witness coaching and focus groups used to test arguments.
Perhaps de Lestrade struck lucky with his cast, or perhaps it is a natural consequence of viewing an extraordinary situation close-up, but The Staircase has a startling strain of black farce. Amusing eccentrics are everywhere, from the shifty blood-spatter expert Duane Deaver to the chubby, scruffy bloke operating the defence’s courtroom PowerPoint presentation, whose phone keeps going off during a tense rehearsal on the eve of the trial. Part of the point is that Peterson can afford huge legal fees and has a better experience as a result, but his money only buys him a slightly shabby bunch of guys who are improvising their way through a case that keeps blindsiding them with ludicrous new facts.
De Lestrade’s slightly grainy footage paints North Carolina in the early noughties as an eerily ancient, analogue world: a typical Staircase scene features men in boxy suits and big polo shirts wrestling inelegantly with flipchart easels or pinboards in a horribly lit conference room. There is something disturbing about the banality of it all, especially since the gravity of the situation never stops these co-workers sharing a joke. At one point, Peterson’s attorney is seen laughing heartily while walking across the exact spot where Kathleen died.
At the centre of the circus is the endlessly mysterious presence on camera of Peterson himself: for the viewer, as well as debating whether he is a killer, there is the broader question of exactly what sort of charming enigma we are dealing with. His assured loquacity, despite all the secrets and accusations hanging over him, gives the impression that on some level he is enjoying himself. Relatives who defect to the prosecution side all say they never knew him at all.
This is a man who, soon after being charged with murder, addresses a media scrum with this prepared line: “Kathleen was my life. I’ve whispered her name in my heart a thousand times.” He smokes a flamboyant pipe and rarely breaks down in tears. If he is guilty, he is remarkably sanguine about the prospect of being convicted. If he is innocent, he is … remarkably sanguine about the prospect of being convicted. There is a lingering suspicion that nothing he says is fully felt and no opinion he puts forward is sincerely held. (As well as writing novels, Peterson was a newspaper columnist.) Yet the wider issues the series touches on – such as unhelpfully prurient media coverage, the injustice of a system favouring rich defendants, and the way a serious crime ruins whole families, not just those directly involved – are not left for us to discern ourselves. Peterson has the presence of mind to make all those points himself.
Particularly in the newest episodes, which have an inessential, fans-only feel compared to the original eight covering the trial, it is the character of Peterson who takes over. He becomes not just the subject of The Staircase but its star and de facto director: the closing scene of him listening to a record is, thanks to his outrageous song choice, one final queasily entertaining moment in a series that remains unsettlingly opaque.
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‘MH370: The Plane That Disappeared’ weighs the theories on Malaysian jet’s fate
Compelling netflix doc lays out the evidence suggesting different possibilities, both plausible and farfetched..
A waiter outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, walks past a mural of flight MH370 in 2016.
Joshua Paul/AP
Somebody out there somewhere knows what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
Or maybe her secrets are buried forever, lost along with the 239 passengers who were onboard that flight in 2014 — a flight whose whereabouts remain a mystery and are the foundation for some wild and yet not entirely dismissable conspiracy theories.
Was it a hijacking? A case of mass murder/suicide by pilot? A terrible accident? A meteorite? An act of warfare?
These are some of the theories explored in the three-part Netflix documentary series “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” a compelling and fact-driven work that occasionally veers into tabloid, unmonitored chat-room level territory when it gives voice to a handful of folks whose theories are dubious at best. On balance, though, director Louise Malkinson and executive producers Sam Maynard and Fiona Stourton do a solid job of laying out the known details with the help of archival news footage, a few obligatory dramatic re-creations and some immensely helpful graphics, while retaining a healthy skepticism about some of the more outlandish hypotheses put forth over the last nine years.
A three-part documentary series available Wednesday on Netflix.
Is the mystery solved? As producer Harry Hewland says in the press materials, “We knew from the start that if thousands of technically savvy aviation experts hadn’t found an answer, what hope did a bunch of TV producers have?” Where “MH370” succeeds is in laying out the case for three key theories and leaving it to the viewer to determine which is the most plausible.
Each episode focuses on one primary theory while also exploring a few other possibilities, as we hear from aviation experts, journalists, airline officials and surviving family members, whose grief has been compounded over by the incompetence and arrogance of the Malaysian government, and the lack of closure.
Here’s what we know for sure: At 12:14 a.m., Flight 370 takes off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on a redeye to Beijing Capital International Airport. When the plane is about to leave Malaysian air space and communications will be handed off to the control tower in Vietnam, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah says to the tower, “Uh, good night Malaysian 370” in a matter-of-fact tone. About 90 seconds later, the plane goes electronically dark, vanishes from the radar and is never heard from again.
- Episode One, titled “The Pilot,” explores the theory that Zaharie Ahmad Shah deliberately crashed the plane into the Indian Ocean. Says aviation journalist Jeff Wise, “Maybe he says to the co-pilot, ‘Hey buddy, why don’t you go back and get me something,’ ” after which the pilot would lock the door and turn off all the electronics. “Maybe he starts depressurizing the cabin…” Maybe. Maybe. But why? No plausible explanation is ever given, no proof is ever produced.
- Episode Two, “The Hijack,” looks into the possibility a small group of Russian passengers gained access to the electronics bay, switched off equipment and somehow gained control of the plane, which eventually wound up in Kazakhstan. Says aviation expert Mike Exner: “It’s all based on fantasies, not reality.”
- In Episode Three, “The Intercept,” a French journalist advances the hypothesis there was suspicious and problematic cargo aboard the plane, and the U.S. military had no choice but to take out the plane to stop that sensitive cargo from reaching China, either by missile strike or mid-air collision.
I know. It all sounds crazy. And to the credit of the filmmakers, they’re for the most part as skeptical as we are. Throughout the series, we keep seeing news reports about the latest shocking twist or dramatic turn in the ongoing investigation. At one point it seems all but certain that contrary to the original flight path that would have seen the plane crashing in the South China Sea, radar data indicates it took a hard left and wound up in the Indian Ocean. Enter one “Blaine Gibson, Adventurer,” as the graphics identify him, a globe-trotting character who tells us he was on a Facebook group and asked oceanographers where he might find debris from the wreckage. “And they said, ‘There will be debris on the Mozambique channel on the coast of Mozambique.’ … So I went to Vilanculos, a town on the Mozambique channel, and I asked people if they had seen any debris.”
In 2018, Blaine Gibson (right) and Jacquita Gomes, wife of a man lost on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, show a piece of debris believed to be from the missing plane.
Boom! The next thing we see is footage of Gibson in sandals, khakis and a T-shirt, finding small pieces of debris within 20 minutes of his arrival. Well THAT was easy. Meanwhile, there’s a woman in Florida who tells us, “My hobby is photography, so I have an eye for detail…” and is convinced she has found images of the wreckage in the original search site of the South China Sea.
So many of the theories we see explored in “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” are outlandish, not fully formed, difficult to believe. And yet, and yet … a plane carrying some 239 souls took off from Malaysia in the middle of the night some nine years ago, and as if we’re in some real-life nightmare straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” we know something bizarre and tragic occurred.
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‘Wednesday’ Review: The Strange Girl Is on the Case
Netflix’s addition to the Addams Family universe turns the death-obsessed daughter into a high school sleuth.
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By Mike Hale
The news that Tim Burton would be directing half the episodes of “Wednesday,” Netflix’s new dramedy about the Addams Family’s death-obsessed young daughter, piqued interest. It would be Burton’s first real television work in nearly 40 years, since he directed episodes of “Faerie Tale Theatre” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” And Burton, an often magical storyteller attracted to off-kilter material, seemed as if he might be a good match for Charles Addams’s macabre cartoon family.
But neither Addams nor Burton appears to be the primary force behind “Wednesday,” whose eight episodes premiere on the appropriate day this week. The show was created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, best known for the young-Superman series “Smallville,” and the sensibility of “Wednesday” lines up with that earlier work: high-minded teenage melodrama. More focused on morbid humor, for sure, and, like “Smallville,” reasonably well executed and entertaining. But still, teenage melodrama.
Toward that end, the rest of the Addams Family is mostly absent from the show, though the actors playing those well-known characters are the big names in the cast. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, as Wednesday’s parents, Morticia and Gomez, feature largely in just one episode; the same goes for Fred Armisen as her Uncle Fester. Besides Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday , the one family member with a regular role is Thing, the disembodied hand.
Wednesday Addams, High School Sleuth
Jenna ortega stars as the addams family’s death-obsessed young daughter in netflix’s new series “wednesday.”.
- Review : “Perhaps for the first time, an Addams Family story pushes Wednesday toward being more like everyone else,” our critic writes .
- Inhabiting Wednesday: Ortega, a former Disney star, plays a teenage version of the character, who is sent to a boarding school for outcasts. This is what she said about taking on the role .
- Iconic Moves : Ortega’s Wednesday dance is a viral and cultural sensation , but why? Disarming and defiant, it’s the dance of a nonconformist .
- Along for the Ride: Joy Sunday, who plays a siren and popular girl who clashes with Wednesday, shares glimpses of her life in 2022 through seven photos in her camera roll .
“Wednesday” begins with a trademark act of calculated violence by its heroine, as if to establish her bona fides. It gets her expelled from high school — she’s older here than in earlier iterations, turning 16 in the course of the season — and sent to her parents’ alma mater, Nevermore Academy, a Vermont school for “outcasts” where the cliques are made up of werewolves, vampires, sirens and the like.
This situates the show among the post-“Harry Potter” proliferation of supernatural high school dramas, with the requisite town-versus-gown conflict, here characterized as the normies versus the outcasts. And when Wednesday discovers that people are being killed by a monster in the nearby woods, she goes into girl-detective mode, complete with voice-over narration that recalls “Veronica Mars.”
Amid these various familiar TV structures, the morbidity and sarcasm that have always characterized Wednesday become more of a motif, a running gag, than a defining trait. More fundamentally, her alienation from her schoolmates, teachers and parents becomes something she has to overcome. The through line of “Wednesday” is toward learning the value of teamwork, tolerance and human connection. Perhaps for the first time, an Addams Family story pushes Wednesday toward being more like everyone else.
This will not be what real fans of Charles Addams and his characters are looking for, and “Wednesday” is satisfying only on the level of formulaic teenage romance and mystery. On that basis it’s pretty tolerable, though. Burton’s episodes — the first four — have style and some wit, from an opening shot of Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), falling out of his locker to the candy-colored beauty of a nighttime carnival scene, which includes a wonderful long shot of Wednesday chasing a schoolmate through the midway beneath a scrim of exploding fireworks. (Burton closes out his episodes with a baroque bit of mayhem, clearly inspired by “Carrie,” that is more excessive than inspired.)
The teenage-redemption themes of “Wednesday” are also a good fit for the 20-year-old Ortega, who broke in as a child actor on the Disney Channel and in CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and has since branched out into slasher films like this year’s “Scream.” She doesn’t do much with Wednesday’s mean-girl punch lines, which is at least partly the fault of the writing — they drop into the script like stones. (“I don’t bury hatchets, I sharpen them.” “Sartre said hell was other people. He was my first crush.”)
She’s good, though, with the side of the character that’s been invented for the show — she puts across this Wednesday’s submerged desire to connect with her effervescent werewolf roommate, Enid (Emma Myers, giving the show’s liveliest, funniest performance), and she gets at the small core of poignancy that’s there among the soap opera machinations and routine scary-creature battles. (Most of the latter come after Burton’s episodes, unfortunately.)
Also in the cast, in a medium-size role as the only non-supernatural teacher at Nevermore, is Christina Ricci, who portrayed a younger Wednesday in the two live-action Addams Family films of the 1990s. The joke is that the woman famous for playing the strange child is now the most aggressively normal character onscreen, and Ricci cleverly amps up her energy a little, as if it were a strain for her to make the switch. Like “Wednesday” itself, she’s crossed over to the side of the normies.
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- A smart lawyer whose drinking and recklessness send him on a path of self-destruction finds new purpose investigating a teenager's apparent suicide.
- When teenager Lara is found hanged at the local ballet school it is assumed that she committed suicide; detective Gabríela believes there is more to it than that and starts digging into the girl's life. She isn't the only person investigating; Lara's parents have employed a lawyer to look into the case. As the series progresses it becomes apparent there are a lot of very unpleasant things going on; a pair of boys are posting videos of girls having sex onto the internet, a ballet teacher who bullies his students and gives them drugs, an adoptive father who clearly has something to hide and some young men who are getting teenage girls hooked on drugs before forcing them into prostitution.
- Follow A spin-off from legal series Réttur (The Court), Case opens with the apparent suicide of a promising young ballerina, and follows the battle between her biological parents and her foster parents to uncover the truth behind her death - with everything seen through the eyes of the lawyers involved. — ahmetkozan
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Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case – Netflix Review
Posted by Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard | Mar 17, 2021 | Read Time 3 min.
UNDER SUSPICION: UNCOVERING THE WESPHAEL CASE is a new Netflix Docu-Series. This is the true-crime case about the Belgian politician Bernard Wesphael who was accused of murdering his wife in 2013. Read our full Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case review here!
UNDER SUSPICION: UNCOVERING THE WESPHAEL CASE is a new Netflix documentary series in the true-crime genre. It covers the 2013 murder of Véronique Pirotten. Her husband, Belgian politician Bernard Wesphael, was accused of having murdered her when she was found dead in a hotel room in Ostend.
The docu-series has 5 episodes each with a runtime of around 35 minutes, so it’s a fairly quick watch. Fair warning: There is a lot of information in various languages, so you will need to pay attention. For this reason alone, it’s a good thing that the episodes are fairly short. It is also very interesting, so it should easily keep you hooked.
Continue reading our Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case review below and find all episodes on Netflix now.
Who do you believe?
This is a docu-series along the lines of The Staircase . You’ll be presented with many facts but no real conclusion which leaves you with the very simple question: Who (or what facts) do I believe?
Sure, there’s a trial and some sort of closure in that sense. Also, there’s a book (which can’t help but remind me of O.J. Simpson) and lots of people giving opposing views.
Ultimately, what is very clear is the fact that Bernard Wesphael and Véronique Pirotton had an extremely dysfunctional and toxic relationship. They married just three months after getting together and she died the following year. During their marriage, she had an affair and appears to have attempted suicide more than once. Also, they both drank heavily!
Naturally, all of the events from their relatively short relationship (and even shorter marriage) play into the case of her death. Was it murder or suicide? Well, since killing yourself by way of a plastic bag over your head isn’t the easiest thing, I’m not exactly on board with that particular explanation.
Then again, that’s my interpretation of the facts presented.
The case as told by Bernard Wesphael
The Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case series does naturally suffer under the circumstance that only one of the two people present, when Véronique Pirotton died, is left to tell the story. This means the accused, Bernard Wesphael, is able to tell the story exactly how he wishes.
It did irritate me a lot while watching this docu-series since I do think he gets way too much screen-time. Especially when he comes to describing his deceased wife in a lot less flattering ways. And yet, this also speaks volumes about him. Plus, we are also presented with evidence in the form of pictures, expert opinions (medical and otherwise) as well as witnesses.
Much like the Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel docu-series, the events take place at a hotel. This means two key things perfect for a documentary; Lots of surveillance footage and witnesses at the scene.
In the case of Véronique Pirotton’s death, the witnesses have seen her interact with her (supposedly estranged) husband, Bernard Wesphael, in the public areas. Also, they heard a lot of noises. First the very classic sounds of two people engaging in consenting sex and then something very different. Something strange and sinister that sounded off!
Also, we see them interact which both confirms history and highlights the stranger parts of it. Again, in my opinion!
Watch Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case on Netflix now!
With just five episodes that are all under 40 minutes in runtime, this is a quick docu-series to watch. If you enjoy true-crime documentaries, then this is certainly worth checking out.
Again, I do feel the need to warn viewers that this requires your full attention. Several languages are spoken and you’ll see newspaper clipping where you’ll want to catch what it says. The subtitles are good but there is a lot of information you need to pay attention to. Fortunately, it’s told chronologically which does help a lot.
If you liked the French Netflix documentary series Who Killed Little Gregory (read our review here) , then this one should also hold your interest. Plenty of interesting people, with lots of opinions, along with facts that could often be interpreted in more ways than one. Then again, isn’t that always the case if you spin something well enough?
All episodes in the Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case series are on Netflix from March 17, 2021.
This true-crime series follows the high-profile court case of Belgian politician Bernard Wesphael, who was accused of murdering his wife in 2013.
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Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard
I write reviews and recaps on Heaven of Horror. And yes, it does happen that I find myself screaming, when watching a good horror movie. I love psychological horror, survival horror and kick-ass women. Also, I have a huge soft spot for a good horror-comedy. Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE when animals are harmed in movies, so I will immediately think less of any movie, where animals are harmed for entertainment (even if the animals are just really good actors). Fortunately, horror doesn't use this nearly as much as comedy. And people assume horror lovers are the messed up ones. Go figure!
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Collections, tv/streaming, movie reviews, chaz's journal, contributors, operation fortune: ruse de guerre.
Now streaming on:
Guy Ritchie's "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre" is a strangely limp affair, considering the loaded cast ( Jason Statham , Hugh Grant , Aubrey Plaza , Cary Elwes ), the glamorous international locations (Madrid! Morocco! Cannes!), and the general fun of a high-speed chase to track down a MacGuffin of potentially world-ending proportions. But something's missing—stakes, for one. Nothing is on the line. Ritchie's story style usually involves messing about with structure and linearity, twisting up the format with feints, and flashbacks, all powered by fast-paced, witty snarky dialogue. None of that is really in evidence in "Operation Fortune." The characters never take shape, not even as caricatures. There are elements of parody, but "Operation Fortune" is not broad enough to be a spoof. It's weirdly empty.
Jason Statham plays Orson Fortune, an in-demand operative called in by the British government on occasion to execute difficult tasks of national importance. The British government here is represented by Nathan (Cary Elwes), whose job is keeping the unreliable Orson on track. Orson, we are told before we meet him, has a host of phobias, making him a risky hire. But then Orson appears, and he seems like an average laconic-speaking action hero. He boards multiple planes throughout, enduring long international flights with no sign of phobia. So many missed possibilities for humor! Why set up the phobia and then not show it at all?
Should Orson choose to accept it, the task is to track down a stolen briefcase that contains a mysterious object about to be sold on the black market, the shady underworld of arms dealers, drug runners, state secrets, and other nefarious transactions. Nobody knows what's in the briefcase, but whatever it is is so dangerous it must not get into the wrong hands. (The mystery of what's in the briefcase is not revealed until halfway through the film. This is meant to be suspenseful but has the opposite effect.) Orson puts together his small team: J.J. Davies ( Bugzy Malone ), who spends a lot of time staring at GPS screens and reporting locations, and Sara Fidel (Aubrey Plaza), a computer expert who can hack into anything. Their first operation is infiltrating an extremely elite party hosted by billionaire George Simonds (Hugh Grant) on his yacht. Simonds hangs out with a very sketchy group, including two creeps in "biotech" and a roving band of drunken thieves, all of whom also want the briefcase.
Since getting invited to this party is impossible, the team blackmails an unwitting movie star named Danny Francesco ( Josh Hartnett ), hoping he will be celebrity catnip for the cagey Simonds. It works. With Danny out in front, Orson posing as Danny's manager, and Sara posing as Danny's girlfriend, the trio gains access to the party. George lights up at the sight of Danny Francesco, the movie star! Hugh Grant, who was so hilarious in Ritchie's " The Gentlemen ," is rather inert here. However, the performance does have its high points (his insinuating deadened voice oozing corruption, his flat gray hair, his tinted glasses calling to mind Jim Jones or Robert Evans . He comes across as a cooing dead-eyed gargoyle.) Hijinx, lies, and near-misses ensue. The caper is complicated by warring groups of independent contractors, all after the briefcase, who must be shut down by any means necessary.
What is missing overall is eccentricity. Ritchie's films are usually filled with eccentric nuts, replete with quirks and weird vocal patterns and gestures. The characters in "Operation Fortune" are generic by comparison. The spy team's interactions lack the sizzle of conflict, even humor. J.J. is nondescript. Sara is supposed to be nerdy and awkward (but only intermittently), the kind of person who tries and fails to crack jokes. When no one laughs, she explains the joke. This happens multiple times but doesn't coalesce into a "bit." Plaza spends most of the film staring at a computer screen, a waste of one of the most talented actresses working today. Orson is supposed to be phobia-ridden, which could have been a lot of fun, but he is mainly indistinct. These are all funny actors, but nobody gets to be funny.
Excepting Josh Hartnett. Danny starts as your garden-variety egotistical movie star but slowly morphs into a different kind of man through the traumatic experience of being whisked away from Hollywood onto a yacht in the Mediterranean by a trio of spies. His is the only real character arc in "Operation Fortune." Every time he's onscreen, the mood lightens. Danny is constantly in giddy confusion, tongue-tied and terrified, out of his element and depth. His journey leads to a coda sparking with welcome cynicism. Danny feels like the central character, but unfortunately, he is peripheral, a sidekick to the blah spies staring at computer screens.
Even the occasional sarcastic quip—usually so ruthless in Ritchie's scripts—feels warmed-over, obligatory. Nothing pops. There's no point of view. "Operation Fortune" is a caper that doesn't caper at all.
Now playing in theaters.
Sheila O'Malley
Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .
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Film credits.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
Rated R for language and violence.
114 minutes
Jason Statham as Orson Fortune
Aubrey Plaza as Sarah Fidel
Josh Hartnett as Danny Franscesco
Hugh Grant as Greg Simmonds
Cary Elwes as Nathan Jasmine
Bugzy Malone as JJ Davies
Peter Ferdinando as Mike
Eddie Marsan as Norman
Lourdes Faberes as Emilia
- Guy Ritchie
- Ivan Atkinson
- Marn Davies
Cinematographer
- Alan Stewart
- James Herbert
- Christopher Benstead
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Review: Idris Elba returns as Luther in grisly Netflix film
Idris Elba brings back his tortured, brooding detective John Luther in “Luther: The Fallen Sun," which finds him imprisoned and haunted by a case he was unable to solve
For anyone holding on to some latent hope that Idris Elba will be the next James Bond, I have some bad news: “ Luther: The Fallen Sun ” puts (another) nail in that very firmly sealed coffin. In one of the rare moments of levity in the sinister film, the embattled detective John Luther sits down at a chic bar and tells the bartender it’s been a long day (an understatement).
“I would say a long day calls for a martini,” the bartender says.
Luther’s response? “No.” He’ll take some water, and, “if it makes you happy you can make it fizzy.”
This was not an accidental moment, “Luther” creator Neill Cross has said. Elba even wondered if it was a bit too cheeky. But it’s worth remembering that Elba doesn’t need Bond. He’s already got a moody, tortured bachelor with a talent for hunting bad guys. And Luther belongs exclusively to him.
In this outing, written by Cross and directed by Jamie Payne, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) John Luther finds himself imprisoned for his unconventional methods at work and haunted by the unsolved missing person case that opens the film and sets its macabre tone. His imprisonment and the missing teen are related — the work of a wealthy villain David Robey (Andy Serkis) who film introduces to the audience as such in the first few moments.
Serkis’ character is a kind of gentleman psychopath, with his blown out James Spader in “Pretty in Pink” coif and maniacal smile. He’s one of those villains for whom chaos, misery and gore are the point. David Robey is methodical, patient and unsparing — he’ll even go so far as to befriend the families of his victims after the fact.
At the start, the film takes on a kind of David Fincher vibe, with echoes of “Seven” and “Zodiac” crossed with some of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.” Unfortunately it takes the conceit to such absurd lengths by the end that the premise takes on an unintentional silliness. That’s not even counting the brawls between Elba and Serkis, whose sizes could not be more mismatched.
But the good news is that it’s a pretty fun, tense ride up until that point with some stunning shots of London at night. Elba slips back into Luther like no time has passed, though he has taken on some superhero-adjacent talents here, evident in his escape from jail — a sequence that is somehow both violent and cartoonish. It’s not an easy or straightforward role, but Elba makes it look so. This is a guy who is so devoted to his former job that he’ll risk death to break out of prison and get right back to work trying to solve the case, knowing well that he’s also being hunted by his replacement, DCI Odette Raine (Cynthia Erivo, not to be trifled with).
Odette does not want to collaborate with Luther and even enlists his old boss Martin (Dermot Crowley, a comforting presence) to help figure out how to find him. This resistance starts to get a tad redundant and futile, especially since it’s quite obvious that eventually they’ll figure out a way to collaborate and perhaps could have saved some lives had they done so earlier. And at times, you just kind of wish Luther could take a vacation — it can be exhausting watching his relentless pursuit, but there's little room for boredom in a movie that never lets its protagonist take a breath.
And then of course there’s the ludicrous theatrics of Robey’s ultimate plan, which hinges on the assumption that would be serial killers and snuff-porn fetishists are everywhere just waiting for a twisted mind to live-stream gruesome murders. As if going by some bad guy checkbook, this “Saw”-like game show also takes place in a hidden lair in the snowy north.
But even though it may go over-the-top at the end, Elba keeps you interested.
You needn’t have watched all five seasons of “Luther” to take a chance on “Luther: The Fallen Sun." But there’s also a chance that you may find yourself wanting to afterwards.
“Luther: The Fallen Sun,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “disturbing/violent content, language and some sexual material.” Running time: 129 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
MPA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.
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Review: Idris Elba returns as Luther in grisly Netflix film
In "The Fallen Sun," John Luther finds himself imprisoned for his unconventional methods at work and haunted by an unsolved missing person case.
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For anyone holding on to some latent hope that Idris Elba will be the next James Bond , I have some bad news: “Luther: The Fallen Sun” puts (another) nail in that very firmly sealed coffin. In one of the rare moments of levity in the sinister film, the embattled detective John Luther sits down at a chic bar and tells the bartender it’s been a long day (an understatement).
“I would say a long day calls for a martini,” the bartender says.
Luther’s response? “No.” He’ll take some water, and, “if it makes you happy you can make it fizzy.”
This was not an accidental moment, “Luther” creator Neill Cross has said. Elba even wondered if it was a bit too cheeky. But it’s worth remembering that Elba doesn’t need Bond. He’s already got a moody, tortured bachelor with a talent for hunting bad guys. And Luther belongs exclusively to him.
In this outing, written by Cross and directed by Jamie Payne, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) John Luther finds himself imprisoned for his unconventional methods at work and haunted by the unsolved missing person case that opens the film and sets its macabre tone. His imprisonment and the missing teen are related — the work of a wealthy villain David Robey (Andy Serkis) who film introduces to the audience as such in the first few moments.
Serkis’ character is a kind of gentleman psychopath , with his blown out James Spader in “Pretty in Pink” coif and maniacal smile. He’s one of those villains for whom chaos, misery and gore are the point. David Robey is methodical, patient and unsparing — he’ll even go so far as to befriend the families of his victims after the fact.
At the start, the film takes on a kind of David Fincher vibe, with echoes of “Seven” and “Zodiac” crossed with some of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.” Unfortunately it takes the conceit to such absurd lengths by the end that the premise takes on an unintentional silliness. That’s not even counting the brawls between Elba and Serkis, whose sizes could not be more mismatched.
But the good news is that it’s a pretty fun, tense ride up until that point with some stunning shots of London at night. Elba slips back into Luther like no time has passed, though he has taken on some superhero-adjacent talents here, evident in his escape from jail — a sequence that is somehow both violent and cartoonish. It’s not an easy or straightforward role, but Elba makes it look so. This is a guy who is so devoted to his former job that he’ll risk death to break out of prison and get right back to work trying to solve the case, knowing well that he’s also being hunted by his replacement, DCI Odette Raine ( Cynthia Erivo , not to be trifled with).
Odette does not want to collaborate with Luther and even enlists his old boss Martin (Dermot Crowley, a comforting presence) to help figure out how to find him. This resistance starts to get a tad redundant and futile, especially since it’s quite obvious that eventually they’ll figure out a way to collaborate and perhaps could have saved some lives had they done so earlier. And at times, you just kind of wish Luther could take a vacation — it can be exhausting watching his relentless pursuit, but there’s little room for boredom in a movie that never lets its protagonist take a breath.
And then of course there’s the ludicrous theatrics of Robey’s ultimate plan, which hinges on the assumption that would be serial killers and snuff-porn fetishists are everywhere just waiting for a twisted mind to live-stream gruesome murders. As if going by some bad guy checkbook, this “Saw”-like game show also takes place in a hidden lair in the snowy north.
But even though it may go over-the-top at the end, Elba keeps you interested.
You needn’t have watched all five seasons of “Luther” to take a chance on “Luther: The Fallen Sun.” But there’s also a chance that you may find yourself wanting to afterwards.
“Luther: The Fallen Sun,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “disturbing/violent content, language and some sexual material.” Running time: 129 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
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‘MH370: The plane that disappeared’, review: mystery or error?
In the three-part documentary MH370: The plane that disappeared from Netflix, the British director Louise Malkinson makes it clear that the airline Malaysia Airlines has a lot to explain in relation to the disappearance of Flight 370, which occurred in March 2014.
It may seem like a no-brainer, until careful research reveals the company’s omissions and technical errors. Most unknown to the public and coming to light for the first time. But MH370: The plane that disappeared goes further, revealing the direct responsibility of the airline in the difficulties to unravel one of the most controversial cases of modern aeronautics.
The script uses both verifiable — or at least available — facts and hypotheses to make a complete reconstruction of the event. Something that allows you to explore all the edges of a tragedy that quickly became the center of all kinds of conspiracy theories. The first chapter of the series shows, perhaps, the only point on which all the debates agree. There was no indication of the disaster that was about to strike.
MH370: The plane that disappeared
The documentary is a methodical reconstruction of the mystery of the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in March 2014. In three chapters, it analyzes the events that occurred during the first days of the mysterious air disaster. Also, the responsibility of the airline in the considerable failures in the search protocol. But the production is much more interested in telling how the tragedy impacted the lives of the relatives and friends of the victims. Beyond the conspiracy theories and the controversial debates about air safety, the miniseries shows the human face of the incident. And he presents his disturbing perspective on the lack of answers to the biggest unknowns surrounding the case.
Score: 4.5 out of 5.
MH370: The plane that disappeared and that it is still a mystery
At least on March 8, 2014, when the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. Rightly, the argument includes everything from images of the airport to a short narrative of daily life in the facilities. It also makes it clear that the MH370 (a Boeing 777) was another of many routes that they took off the same day under similar conditions. Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s final message, wishing him good night and ensuring that all is well, did not indicate a major disorder or even a deadly situation.
Perhaps one of the most chilling elements of the story of MH370: The plane that disappeared be the admission of a fact that remains a mystery. Once the aircraft took off, there are few explanations as to what might have happened. The documentary builds a narrative thread that covers the first hours and days of uncertainty. From the increasingly urgent news about the catastrophe, to the way in which relatives and friends of the victims reacted to the event. The first episode covers the layers of tragedy with the orderly and familiar method of a true crime .
But, beyond the reconstruction of the events, he also points out that the available data do not lead to any conclusion. The opening chapter closes with an ominous image of the Beijing airport, in which the MH370 is marked as delayed. The first indication of what would be a chain of increasingly murky circumstances.
A case where nothing is as it seems
Arguably, the real enigma surrounding Flight 370 begins with a hasty statement. Malaysia Airlines immediately admitted that it had no indication of what might have caused the disappearance. Also that it lacked scenarios that could provide some explanation for an event of such magnitude.
The company’s negligence not only extends to its handling of what happened, in terms of search and technical resources. MH370: The plane that disappeared shows that there was no method of collecting information. This includes the dissemination of news and the exchange of data with the various agencies of neighboring countries that rushed to intervene in the search for the flight.
if something makes it clear MH370: The plane that disappeared is that the airline handled the incident in a rash and disorderly manner. And what is even worse. That his mistakes during the first weeks of tracking the aircraft are the reason for an unanswered enigma. Little by little, the second chapter of the documentary delves into the failed protocol to discover clues.
The fatal sequence of events MH370: The plane that disappeared
However, he is sensitive enough to focus his story on the families of the disappeared. Gradually, the plot abandons mere technical details to explore the survivors of a devastating loss. An interest that increases as you delve into the stories of several of the relatives and friends of the 239 people on board. Director Louise Malkinson places special emphasis on how the greatest suffering lies precisely in the absence of answers .
MH370: The plane that disappeared It links the airline’s mistakes during the investigation with how they impacted entire families. For the production, the contradictory versions of the accident are as important as the pain left behind by the unknown of what happened. Especially, once the conspiracy theories of kidnappings, shootdowns and violence multiplied.
The argument delves into some hypotheses, but above all in the possibility that an error – due to malice or omission – is the real cause of the accidents. Which he endorses in the second episode, by detailing that flight 370 is not the only tragedy in the annals of Malaysia Airlines in 2014.
As baffling as it may seem, a second fatal incident was recorded on the airline on July 17. Flight 17 was shot down by Russian-controlled military forces in Ukraine. Amid public and political tensions, the case turned into a contentious discussion on aviation safety. What happened, with opaque and controversial data such as that of 370, was another element of confusion in the global investigation.
With route between Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, there is not enough information about what happened. With 283 passengers and 15 crew members dead, it was deemed a disaster that signaled — again — serious failings in safety protocol. But, what is even more worrying, the airline’s scant efforts to correct mistakes that led to tragedies.
In the end, the story belongs to the victims
But the Netflix documentary is much more interested in the human layer of the incident. Nine years later, there are still no clear answers. The search was officially abandoned in 2017. The families of the victims do not have access to documents, data or information on the evolution of the investigation. Much less, to a possible answer in the future of what could have happened.
For now, the mystery of Flight 370 remains intact and, what is even more difficult to accept, there is little chance that the enigma will be solved. Perhaps the hardest point of an incident that became a collective obsession and is now part of a historical mystery that tries to unravel in MH370: The plane that disappeared .
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