Leo Woodall

I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t enjoy Tuner. It’s a heist caper as well as a romance and while it hits some familiar beats it hits them in new ways. Set in the piano-tuning world – which may be a first – it’s sound-driven (jazz, classical and more) and has something to say about music, identity, artistic envy. In addition it stars Dustin Hoffman and Leo Woodall, who have cracking chemistry. You will not have realised that bird song can hurt It’s a first feature film from Daniel Roher (otherwise an Oscar-winning documentary maker), who proves here that he has equal talent for fiction. Hoffman plays Harry, a New York piano tuner who once played jazz with Herbie Hancock and the like – although maybe he didn’t. (He seems to be slipping into dementia.

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in. His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber. For a while, the chamber went unexplained as we cut to ‘Cambridge, England’ – and therefore to eight strapping young men rowing on the river.