Author: Diana Paul

My Top 17 Movies and Series for 2024

Written by Diana Paul on January 12, 2025. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. No Comments on My Top 17 Movies and Series for 2024

This year I have seventeen films and series to recommend. Some are less well-known and under-the-radar. Also, there seemed to be more selections from DEI producers and writers, for a welcomed change! Here are the reviews I wrote this past year with the criteria that they were available online. Of the 45 reviews I posted this year, these are my favorites, my “listicle”. As in past years, both television and cinema have continued to produce phenomenal story-telling and intriguing characters. And this year many of the indie/foreign films could have...

Conclave–A Sinful Synod

Written by Diana Paul on January 6, 2025. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on Conclave–A Sinful Synod

Based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris, Conclave opens with the death of the current pope and the mandate to appoint a successor through the conclave or synod of over one hundred cardinals from all over the globe. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the right-hand Brit who is the dean, must supervise the synod. As the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders gather to vote, Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci) argues that he is best positioned to be pope, although he protests that he has no ambition to be the Holy Pontiff. Tormented by his own crisis in faith and by...

Black Doves–”Slow Horses” meets “The Americans”?

Written by Diana Paul on December 30, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. 2 Comments on Black Doves–”Slow Horses” meets “The Americans”?

The six-episode Netflix mini-series Black Doves is being promoted as a Christmas holiday spy thriller, full of such fun scenes as explosions, intense gun-fight street battles and stylish upper-class British banter to mix up with the tinsel and ornaments. Helen Webb (Keira Knightley of “Pirates of the Carribean”, “Pride and Prejudice” and “Bend It Like Beckham”) is an unlikely agent in a highly secretive espionage group called the Black Doves. Selling intel to whomever is willing to pay for it, Black Doves has no allegiance to the British. Married to the Defense Minister, Wallace...

Day of the Jackal–Hunt or Be Hunted

Written by Diana Paul on December 22, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. No Comments on Day of the Jackal–Hunt or Be Hunted

In this Peacock mini-series released November 2024, British assassin-for-hire and super-sniper is known only as the “Jackal” by police and those paying him millions. Of course, he has multiple aliases and disguises. An update of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel and the 1973 movie, Day of the Jackal is a modern high-stakes thriller of international politics, espionage, and the dark web. It is not a sequel to the movie. A cold-blooded, shapeshifting chameleon, the Jackal (Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne for “The Theory of Everything” and nominated for “The Danish Girl”) masterminds...

The Americans–Cold War at Home

Written by Diana Paul on December 16, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. No Comments on The Americans–Cold War at Home

In this multiple award-winning six-season Hulu series (2013-2018), The Americans has invaded the hearts of countless viewers. The Americans takes place during the Reagan era of 1980-1987, the Cold War with Gorbachev and what was known then as the Soviet Union. Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Catherine (Keri Russell) Jennings are high-level Soviet KGB spies who live in Falls Church, Virginia close to where the action is in Washington, DC. Matched as husband and wife by their KGB handlers, all allegiance in the first few seasons is to their homeland. Their two American-born children,...

Paranoid–Someone’s After Me

Written by Diana Paul on December 9, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. No Comments on Paranoid–Someone’s After Me

Paranoid, a British police procedural crime series (2016) set in the small town of Woodmere, opens with a brutal murder of a general practitioner pushing her young son on a swing in a public park. The woman is murdered in public by an unknown man in a black hoodie. Who could be the murderer? And what can the witnesses sitting in the park provide as clues to a possible suspect? Mysterious notes sent by a “Ghost Detective” contribute valuable evidence for identifying and tracking down the murderer. Three detectives–Nina Suresh (Indira Varma of...