7 Feb '11

“Balance won’t count as a virtue to anyone with a dog in the fight, only a kind of limp prevarication. But it’s also because Kosminsky has gone for impeccable imbalance, tugging us emotionally from one side to the other in a way that shows you how difficult it is to achieve any facile equilibrium.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“It’s that rarest of TV beasts: a show that doesn’t patronise its audience, (mostly) steers clear of cliches and trusts the characters to tell the story in their own time.”John Crace, The Guardian

“In Kosminsky’s drama, the modern Israeli forces are not Nazis either. This is a reap-as-you-sow story, a psycho-analysis of a brutalised Israel.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“This four-parter is a little burning bush of genius in the desert of well-intentioned TV dramas.”
Matt Baylis, The Express

“Faulks on Fiction appears to be aimed at viewers who aren’t interested enough in literature to do even the basic reading, at the expense of those who hunger for something a little less Coles Notes.”
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent

“If its thrust was a bit smart-undergraduate, the film had undergraduate panache too, even if, by the end, Faulks had to modify his assertion that ‘Holmes would be the last fictional hero to take on the world and win’.”
Andrew Billen, The Times

“I’ve often found Al Pacino a bit hammy, but as Jack Kevorkian, the American doctor who became a cause celebre through his advocacy of assisted suicide, he gave a movingly understated performance.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“We didn’t know much more about Ronald, after it, but that was pretty much the point of the documentary.”
John Crace, The Guardian

“Arthur’s idea sounds wonderful but is unlikely to catch on outside a TV show, which in this case isn’t all that interesting anyway.”
Matt Baylis, The Express