TV
Seasons 1 and 2 – available now
The first series of Line of Duty had one big advantage over the second: it didn’t have to live up to the first series of Line of Duty. With an explosive start (a botched anti-terror raid), a great cast (the excellent Lennie James alongside Gina McKee, Adrian Dunbar, Vicki McClure and a surprisingly nuanced Neil Morrissey), and a plot that was both gripping and twisty but also packed with enough ambiguity to keep you guessing to the end, it was both a critical and popular success. It was BBC2’s highest-rating drama in a decade, and therefore a lot to live up to for the second series.
But the nature of AC-12’s anti-corruption brief – policing the police – means that it didn’t feel like a stretch to introduce a new “guest lead” (Keeley Hawes) to build the second series around. It’s an interesting model from writer Jed Mercurio that works both in terms of the story – to refresh and move things forward – but also as a practical casting tactic, to attract stars such as Hawes who might be reluctant to sign up for a bigger ongoing commitment. Richard Vine
Available now
The biggest challenge for a show about gangsters is humanising the monsters who are its protagonists so that the viewer has a reason to invest time in their struggle. Tony Soprano might be a loan shark, murderer and 20 other kinds of scumbag but it’s his overbearing mother, ungrateful uncle and dopey son that remind us he’s also a lot like us. In Channel 4’s The Fear the human hook is that Brighton crime kingpin Richie Beckett (Peter Mullan) is suffering from the early stages of an aggressive dementia. A cruel disease afflicts a cruel man – it’s a setup with great potential. James Donaghy
The Search for General Tso
Available now
Documentary about Chinese-American food.
Empresses in the Palace
Available now
An interesting acquisition for Netflix, this Qing Dynasty drama from China has been a hit around Asia. Showing in six parts, edited from its original 76-episode run.
From 4 September
American social ills get the expensive treatment in artist-turned-film-maker One9’s documentary about Illmatic, the classic 1994 album by rapper Nas. A chronicle of the effects of poverty and poor housing on a generation of New York’s black kids, Illmatic was a scouring exposé. One9’s film, shot on high-end kit, flirts with glamorising the rags-to-rap-to-riches story, but in doing so stays true to its subject. Henry Barnes
Only Fools and Horses
Seasons 1 to 2 – from 15 September
This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be on streaming devices all across the country …
Keith Richards: Under the Influence
From 18 September
The Stone rolls alone in this new documentary from director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom) which looks back over Richards’ life as he records a new solo album.
Films
From 4 September
The Pixar-Disney animation from director Pete Docter is a lovely, charming and visually stunning family comedy which can leave no heart unwarmed, although very young children might be a bit scared at some of the chancier moments. Peter Bradshaw
From 11 September
Its lightness of touch has not diminished, nor has its near-miraculous kidult-fusion humour. You can, if you want, remain slightly sneery about the root nostalgia underpinning the storyline – would any kid, these days, really love a plastic spaceman that much? – but the top-notch voicery (with Wallace Shawn standout as a neurotic T-Rex) makes everything hum along. Andrew Pulver
From 11 September
This prequel takes us back to Sulley and Mike’s student days at Monsters University: this is a standard buddy movie, sports movie, and campus movie (with, incidentally, an eerie similarity to The Internship). There’s a reference to Carrie, which is so blandly non-specific and sanitised that it might not even count as a reference at all. It is funny. But the longed-for return to Pixar greatness seems as far away as ever. PB
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1
From 16 September
The Hunger Games enters its final franchise furlong: the third novel has been split and doubled like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, though not tripled like the Hobbit. Perhaps unexpectedly, the story of Katniss Everdeen still has energy and internal coherence. It seems to be on the point of evolving away from young adult drama towards superheroism, as if the whole thing has been a huge origin myth, showing Katniss becoming Mockingjay, a sleek, black-robed ninja with a quiver of deadly arrows, like Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye from the Avengers. PB
From 18 September
The story of Toy Story 2 is still bizarrely gripping and moving. Old-fashioned cowboy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is told to abandon dreams of being loved forever by kids, and instead embrace his antiseptic destiny of existing in a toy museum behind glass. Kids are just fickle creatures. However painful it is in the short term, he must reject their flawed, inconstant love. Kids – and humanity itself – must be painfully, angrily rejected. It is strange that the moral dilemma endured by toys should be as real and compelling as anything in modern Hollywood. But there we are. PB
From 23 September
Ian McEwan’s Atonement and the film version of it inevitably come to mind when reading the Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner or seeing Marc Forster’s film. Here again we have the story of a young person bearing false witness against a lower-class friend and, with a background of war, carrying that guilt throughout life, becoming a writer and seeking redemption. To this is added one of the most painful experiences of our time and a major theme of modern literature: exile and cultural displacement. Philip French
From 24 September
This new Thor film delivers a hammer-blow of boredom to the back of the head. PB
From 25 September
The lastest and arguably the greatest of the Toy Stories – and the moment at which the modern golden age of animation appeared to come to an end. It is a joyous, heartrending parable of saying goodbye to one’s childhood – and accepting that one’s children will grow up and grow away. PB
