For fans of Mick Herron’s “Slow Horses”, the new series Down Cemetery Road is part of the Zoë Boehm series featuring a tough-as-nails Oxford-educated detective (Emma Thompson) who takes no prisoners. The other main character is a quixotic homemaker named Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), whose husband is a cheating liar with little respect or...
My Top 25 Movies and Series of 2025
I have twenty-five films and series to recommend. These are dramas I watched in 2025, but many were produced much earlier. Some are less well-known and under-the-radar. Here are the reviews I wrote this past year with the criteria that they were available for streaming free. Of the 44 reviews I posted this year, these...
Wake Up Dead Man–A Holier-Than-Thou Mystery
Wake Up Dead Man takes place in Chimney Rock, a small town in upstate New York, where a newly ordained Catholic priest named Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been assigned to work under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). An aging, hateful right-wing cleric, Wicks has nothing but contempt for gay...
The Beast in Me–Animal Instincts?
The Beast in Me (2025), a psychological whodunit, is set in Oyster Bay, an affluent suburb in Long Island, where the uber-wealthy play with impunity from law and order. In this drama focused on the dark side of privilege, Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes), a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and affluent resident, is still riding the success...
Dickensian–A Twist on Sherlock Holmes?
Dickensian is a 2016 BBC historical drama mini-series that borrows from several of Charles Dickens’ novels to present his characters’ personalities in a murder mystery, Sherlock Holmes style. The creator, Tony Jordan, repositions some of the most well-known characters from The Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great...
A Mother’s Son–Parental Doom?
In this two-part psychological thriller, A Mother’s Son,(2012) a teenage girl is found brutally stabbed to death in a small town in Suffolk, England. On the night of her murder, newlyweds Ben (Martin Clunes of “Doc Martin”) and Rosie (Hermione Norris), are grappling with their four teenage children’s ...