Spectator Life

From serious sci-fi to spoofs in space, here are films and TV to watch on Netflix if you’re after some futuristic entertainment… Annihilation One of Netflix’s in-house productions, Annihilation sees Natalie Portman play a biologist leading a rescue mission into a mysterious zone on the US coastland known as The Shimmer. It’s an area hit

Gomorrah (Sky) Life in the Naples Mafia (the Camorra) is nasty, brutish, short – and nothing like Goodfellas. Even when you’ve made your millions from the drugs trade, there’s nothing to spend it on save your fleet of armoured 4 x 4s and your gilded cage in some bleak, rundown suburb which it’s never safe

With over 160 million subscribers – which ranks somewhere between the population of Bangladesh and Nigeria – Netflix’s biggest shows command staggering audiences worldwide. But the streaming platform has also snapped up the rights to hundreds of lesser known series, some of which are just as good. Here’s our pick of the undiscovered gems: Rectify

As this year’s Oscar-winning films continue their box office reign, it’s salutary to remember that some excellent films have been honoured over the years. Even as many have faded from memory (Crash, anyone?), some of the award-winners that can be found on Netflix represent the very best in contemporary cinema. Here are some of our

With South Korean film Parasite taking home the Best Picture gong at this year’s Oscars, it’s clear that foreign language films and series are having a bit of a moment. Keen to polish your language skills whilst devouring a good box-set at the same time – or just looking to sound more cultured at your

Every generation, and individual, has to rediscover the arguments for free speech for themselves. Some people learn from major incidents. Some when the censors come for someone close to them, or an opinion that they hold. Others come to believe in free speech because they realise that while being offended on occasion might be terrible,

1917, the World War One epic that has picked up 10 Oscar nominations (including for Best Picture and Best Director for Sam Mendes), is currently going great guns in cinema. If it has put you in the mood for more war on screen, then fire up Netflix, where there are plenty of military flicks to

Lords, Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages: the moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are calling time on their membership of the royal family, deciding to live a financially independent existence, and flying off into the sunset for the snowy wilds

These days we political anoraks can usually get more than our fill of drama – and laughs – from the real world. Just look at what’s happening in Westminster – not to mention the White House. But what if you’re still craving more? Here’s our list of the best Netflix choices, including documentaries, dramas and

It’s no secret that people are fascinated by crime. Nor is this a new phenomenon: writing in 1946, Orwell noted that murder gave a ‘great amount of pleasure to the public’, and proceeded to identify the common features of the gruesome and grisly crimes that gave the British most satisfaction. Psychologists, meanwhile, say that murder

Left-wing people are funny and Conservatives are not. That’s the myth the Left like to perpetuate – particularly left-wing “comedians”, usually with all the wit and subtlety of John McDonnell at a Palestine Solidarity rally. We have in Boris Johnson a Conservative Prime Minister famous for his wit and wordplay – a man who famously

So we’ve come to it once again: busybodies fretting about what the kids are watching on TV. It’s one of those things that comes around at least once every decade, alongside video games, rap music, pornography and social media — a medium that needs to be strictly controlled, lest it infest the suggestible lesser minds

1. Being funny is the main way men attract women; we can’t take that away from them. There’s nothing better then a man who makes you laugh – it’s a quality women value highly and one used to describe every successful date and suggested set up. If women were funny it would be unfair, I

For the poor souls who paid to live-stream the Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek debate, the $15 ticket price must now seem like an act of grand larceny. In what was rather cringingly billed as the ‘debate of the century’—premature in 2019, if nothing else—the psychologist and bestselling author of 12 Rules for Lifeshared a

In celebration of their tenth wedding anniversary, the Cambridges have released a 40 second vignette of their painfully British existence. It’s all Barbour jackets, laughing children and windswept beaches. It is, in other words, a John Lewis nightmare. But who wants an aspirational royal family? That’s kind of the point isn’t it, that they’re not like

The internet has changed beyond recognition in recent years. In the noughties we consumed short, digestible bursts of information online. But now there’s a growing appetite for long-form intellectual content – the internet is chockablock with podcasts, discussions and debates. People are going online to explore ideas that, before, would never have been found beyond

Winston Churchill was no Adonis but most of his portraitists did what they could to flatter him. However, when the British artist Graham Sutherland (1903–80) was commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of Churchill in 1954 for 1,000 guineas (about £27,000 today), paid by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and to

Most men have been appalled at the abusive behaviour unveiled by the #MeToo movement. We have reflected on past indiscretions, salacious conduct and incidents of raw maleness and we feel shame. We wish to show contrition and demonstrate our commitment to feminism but we just don’t know how. We feel excluded by third-wave feminism and

I’m on a narrowboat in Leiden, nursing a filthy hangover, watching this antique city floating past, when I’m awoken from my daydream by a strange whirring noise above me. The glass roof of the canal boat is rapidly descending, and the jolly Dutchman at the tiller is telling me to mind my head. I end

In January, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. The channel broadcast a short version of the interview on the evening news bulletin, where it would have been seen by the few hundred thousand people who watch the programme nightly. But to its credit, Channel 4 also published online the full half-hour

‘I’m afraid you do not like your pen,’ says Miss Bingley to Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. ‘Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.’ You know then — if you didn’t suspect it already — that Mr Darcy could never marry Miss Bingley. Is there anything so maddening as someone

I grew up watching re-runs of ‘Thelma and Louise’ on VHS and mouthing Geena Davis’s line, ‘I don’t remember ever feeling this awake’, in the bathroom mirror, so when my agent rang to tell me that Ridley Scott had ‘responded’ to my audition tape I was a little excited. The audition in question was for

Emma Dent Coad, Kensington’s new Labour MP, has a rule: ‘Don’t do personal.’ Except, that is, when it comes to David Cameron (‘Camoron’), George Osborne (‘double dipstick’), Boris Johnson (‘baby-daddy’), Nick Clegg (‘puny’), a local Tory rival (‘freeloading scumbag’), politicians generally (‘knaves, sophists, deceivers’), the judge running the Grenfell Tower inquiry (doesn’t ‘understand human beings’),

The best-dressed politician of all time was Anthony Eden. His style was something out of an Apparel Arts illustration; long jackets, peaked lapels on single-breasted jackets (a good 60 years before Tom Ford would revive it), high-waist trousers and double-breasted waistcoats. Even the fabled hatter Lock and Co renamed the Homburg hat ‘the Eden’. Those

I am not a patriotic person. I felt joy at London 2012 and like it when our sports teams and players win things; so much of Britain’s history is rich, eclectic, and impressive. But given the fact I barely have a drop of British blood in me, I don’t feel a huge amount of pride

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it is fitting to ask whether we have learned what it tells us about its ideological root. Do we now appreciate that the Marxist ideology destroys legal order, political opposition and human rights? Do we have some idea of the death toll that has in

Most science fiction writers got the future wrong. That’s OK. We don’t read sci-fi for predictions and, often, books set in the future tell us far more about the times they written in. But two 20th Century authors stand out as both relevant and prescient to anyone living in 2017. The great JG Ballard is