Down Cemetery Road, on Apple TV+

Where are Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis when we need them? A house blows up in Oxford but the local police barely bother to notice. Admittedly, the UK deep state (which can’t be bothered to prosecute Chinese spies) does everything possible to block their investigation. That leaves a neurotic art restoration technician and cynical private detective to crack the case in creator Morwenna Banks’ eight-episode Down Cemetery Road, based on Mick Herron’s novel, which is now streaming on Apple TV+.

Just down the street (presumably, it must be on Cemetery Road) a house blows up, just while Sarah Trafford’s conspicuously desperate husband Mark tries to butter-up a skeptical wealthy client. Despite several fatalities, young Dinah survived the inferno—and then she disappeared. Nobody seems to know anything, least fo all the police, so she hires Joe Silverman to track her down. Weirdly and tragically, he kills himself shortly thereafter. Of course, Trafford is skeptical, while Silverman’s partner and philandering wife Zoe Boehm is even more so.

Of course, they team-up as an odd couple, to battle the sinister assassin brothers contracted by Hamza, a nebbish intelligence officer tasked with covering up a disastrous chemical weapons program. It was a rather unsavory experiment that used enlisted British soldiers as guinea pigs. Downey was one of them. He also happens to be Dinah’s uncle and possibly Trafford’s other ally. If exposed, the top secretoperation could be a three-alarm scandal, but Hamza’s abusive boss “C” would still rather humiliate him then offer constructive leadership.

It is surprising that the wickedly smart Slow Horses series was also based on Herron’s novels, because Cemetery Road always takes the most obvious, least surprising fork in the road. Frankly, eight episodes of Boehm bickering with Trafford and C berating Hamza is punishingly excessive. At most, this story could have been better translated as a TV-movie, but even that would have been wholly unnecessary.

Instead, we have schtick all over the place, starting with Emma Thompson’s intermittently amusing Philip Marlowe act. Ruth Wilson’s chronic breakdowns grow increasingly tiresome, but she certainly dispels all memories of her femme fatal glory in Luther while portraying Trafford.

A Very Royal Scandal, on Prime Video

Prince Andrew’s Epstein scandal interview will be taught in PR seminars for decades to come as a text book case illustrating why it is often best to keep your client silent and out of the media. The Prince thought it would be a great opportunity to air his “alibis,” but the world widely considered it an absolute train-wreck. As the Queen’s private secretary puts it, Andrew’s sit-down with BBC2’s Emily Maitlis turned into a real “dog’s dinner.” Yet, the once popular Royal should only blame himself, at least judging from director Julian Jarrold’s three-part A Very Royal Scandal, which premieres today on Prime Video.

At the start of the mini-series, it sure looks like it is good to be a Prince, who always enjoys the finest of everything. Unfortunately, money is tight, because of debts run up by the Duke of York and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, with whom he still cohabitates. However, what his mummy and the UK government will not pay for, his pal Jeffrey Epstein usually covers. Yes, that Epstein—the sex-trafficking sex-offender, whom the Prince met him through his childhood friend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Frankly, rumors swirled regarding the Prince’s relationship with Epstein for years. However, they exploded in the British tabloid press when one of Epstein’s victims released a rather candid photo of her and Andy, looking randy. Andrew and his private secretary Amanda Thirsk want to tell his side of the story, but Sir Andrew Young, the Queen’s private secretary and de facto head of the Royal’s private secretarial service cautions otherwise. However, as criticism mounts, Prince Andrew defiantly agrees to an on-camera sit-down with Maitlis, with the understanding the BBC will analyze the photo he argues has been deep-faked.

As everyone knows, the Prince’s interview made Frost-Nixon look like a triumph, comparing to the cringe of Whitney Houston’s “crack is whack.” However, Jarrold and screenwriter Jeremy Brock make it clear what really undermined Andrew was his arrogance, tone-deafness, and lack of compassion for Epstein’s victims. Perhaps for legal reasons, there is a good deal of ambiguity regarding what exactly the Prince did and did not do, as well as how much he knew and when he knew it. Regardless, it is clearly awkward to explain how you met your sex offender friend. Obviously, it was beyond the Prince’s rather limited abilities.

Still, Michael Sheen’s portrayal is surprisingly interesting because he so fully exposes the Royal’s insecurities and resentments. Sheen also leans into his protectiveness of his daughters and the complex emotional entanglements binding him to Ferguson, even after their bitter, Palace-mandated divorce. Instead of evil or scary, he comes across like a weak and pathetic cry-baby, who was poorly served by his lifelong insulation from responsibility.

On the other hand, Maitlis emerges as a one-note caricature: a hard-charging crusader for the truth, who simply cannot help rolling her eyes at dissembling answers, especially when they come from Conservative politicians (but no such outrage for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism). Frankly, Ruth Wilson largely relies on two huge Princess Leia-like hair-curlers to humanize Maitlis, who arguably nearly matches the Prince’s arrogance, in her own way.

The Little Stranger: Abrahamson Adapts Waters

The Ayres family could be the Ushers of the British interwar period. Their once great manor, Hundreds Hall, has fallen and it can’t get up. Yet, the dour new doctor remains fascinated by the house and the family, because of his experiences as an impressionable youth. The corrosive past is never past enough in Lenny Abrahamson’s The Little Stranger, adapted fairly faithfully from Sarah Waters’ novel, which opens today in New York.

Dr. Faraday’s interest Hundreds Hall started with his mother’s stories of her years spent in-service there. However, he became fully obsessed when he visited the estate in its heyday, for a children’s fair the Ayres family hosted. He was probably even more struck by the wild young Ayres daughter Susan, whose untimely death shortly thereafter was the initial spark of the family’s rapid decline.

Years later, Faraday (nobody calls him by his Christian name) returns to the village to join the local GP’s practice. One of his first house calls is the now dilapidated Hundreds Hall, where Roderick (not Usher) Ayres is technically head of household, but most of the practical matters fall to his sister, Caroline. When the villagers (including Faraday’s partner) talk about her, they say condescending things like: “she’s not pretty, but she has a good head on her shoulders.” In contrast, neither Roderick’s head nor his body healed properly after his return from WWI. He is also somewhat haunted by the death of sister Susan, as are the rest of Ayreses, which at this point only amounts to Caroline, and their imperious mother, Mrs. Ayres (again, no Christian name giveth).

So, is the ghost of Susan Ayres haunting Hundreds Hall? It very likely seems so, unless she is just a loud unnerving metaphor for her family’s profound dysfunction. Either way, Faraday still wants in, so he pursues Caroline like he never could before the Great War.

Obviously, the film and its source novel have a lot to say about class, as well as gender roles and maybe even the treatment of veterans, circa Downton Abbey. However, it still functions as an intriguingly suggestive ghost movie—not in the scare-the-pants-off-you tradition of The Conjuring, but in a what-the-heck-did-I-just-see-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye kind of way.

There is also an eerie resemblance between Domhnall Gleason and Oliver Zetterström, who plays the youthful but still uptight Faraday, seen in fateful flashbacks. As a character, Faraday is a cold fish, who has let his covetousness warp his entire life, but he is only too credible. Ruth Wilson plays Caroline Ayres with an appropriately British stiff upper lip, but she still conveys a sense of a myriad of neuroses barely contained beneath her public façade. Of course, the great Charlotte Rampling is terrific as the regal yet haunted (in maybe more ways than one) Ayres matriarch.

The stately Hundreds Hall is also a terrific trump card for the film. It is endlessly atmospheric, whether seen in its heyday or its shabby nadir. This is a locale that cries out to be haunted, if it isn’t already. Even though it is not intended as a straight horror film, there is still some spooky stuff going on, particularly the business involving the servants summoning bells. It is subtle, but effective. Highly recommended as a genre film for viewers of PBS’s Masterpiece and equivalent British period dramas, The Little Stranger opens today (8/31) at several New York theaters, including the Regal E-Walk.

Clio Barnard’s Dark River

If you remember your King Lear, you understand the problems presented by an indivisible estate and multiple heirs. That is sort of true of Rose Tremain’s Trespass, but it will be hard to recognize her book in the film that it inspired. Clio Barnard’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant was more faithful than her take on Tremain’s novel—and that’s saying something. However, she remains true to her uncompromising vision and exacting aesthetics throughout Dark River (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

For fifteen years, Alice Bell has drifted from farm to farm, primarily working with sheep. She has scrupulously avoided her father’s tenant farm, for reasons we soon guess. However, she finally returns after his death (from a prolonged illness), to claim the farm she believes to be her right, both by birth and as compensation. Of course, that does not sit well with her brother Joe, who has tended the farm, quite poorly, during their father’s slow decline.

As a result, the Bell sibling reunion quickly goes from awkward to downright hostile. At the best of times, they carry on in a cold war footing, bitterly arguing over every farming strategy. However, the potential for violence is always palpable.

Ruth Wilson’s performance as the deeply wounded Alice Bell is harrowingly intense (it also looks like she really learned how to shear sheep). You feel for her keenly, but you’d also want to keep her at arm’s length. That goes quadruple for Mark Stanley’s loutish Joe Bell, but he is not a caricature either. Arguably, his grievances are just as legitimate as hers. In fact, the tragedy of this film is their complete inability to communicate.

Sean Bean gives the film further star-power, representing something of a departure from Barnard’s previous films. In this case, he plays the father, Richard Bell, who is already dead before the picture even starts—possibly a new record for his characters’ early deaths. However, his presence lingers, either as toxic memories or perhaps as a genuine ghost. Nevertheless, the revelation regarding his abuse is sort of a lazy fallback—honestly, these days, it is more surprising when fathers are not molesting their children in socially conscious indie films.

In a great irony (one Barnard wisely resists driving into the ground), the Bell Siblings happen to be fighting over a lease rather than a deed. You do not need to be an agricultural economist to surmise Yorkshire probably does not have a competitive or comparative advantage when it comes farming and livestock. Frankly, that understanding makes the film even more depressing. Yet, it is always invigorating to thesps like Wilson and Stanley at the top of their game. Recommended for admirers Spartan British working-class dramas, such as those by Andrea Arnold, Dark River opens this Friday (6/29) in New York, at the Village East.