Elizabeth debicki

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

Tenet is the latest high-concept, time-bending blockbuster from Christopher Nolan and it’s the film that (unofficially) reopens cinemas in the UK. It has everything that fans of Inception or Interstellar might want. There are spectacular set pieces. There’s time going forwards and then reversing, so it’s bullets flying back into the gun as crashed cars right themselves. There is a relentlessly pounding soundtrack. There is Sir Michael Caine playing Sir Michael Caine — his character is called Sir Michael Crosby but I wasn’t fooled — and as for the plot? Incoherent. Which fans seem to like. (‘I can’t explain any of it but it’s genius,’ I heard one say on the radio the other day. ‘A masterpiece.