Aung San Suu Kyi; Educating Greater Manchester; Life; Twilight Zone

“The best thing to attribute to Aung San Suu Kyi: The Fall of an Icon was that it actually sought to explain the Myanmar de facto leader’s position rather than just serving up a reductive narrative about an icon who went bad. Yet however rounded a picture of Suu Kyi the experts here collectively offered, it was hard to escape a basic moral truth: defending ethnic cleansing (as the UN called the Myanmar situation) is itself indefensible.”
James Jackson, The Times

“How can a Nobel Peace Prize winner and champion for non-violent resistance, democracy and tolerance be delivering tone-deaf pronouncements at The Hague, defending the military junta which imprisoned her? Aung San Suu Kyi: Fall of an Icon was an impeccably researched, thoughtful effort to resolve the conundrum.”
Gabriel Tate, The Telegraph

“The film did an excellent job of telling a complicated, morally discordant story and neither hailed her as a hero nor condemned her as a tyrant. Perhaps it is foolish to try to place her simply into either camp, yet it was hard to watch without the Rohingya people’s suffering at the forefront of my mind.”
Emily Baker, The i

“Returning for retakes might have suggested a lack of imagination, but this second visit to the Salford secondary reaped unexpected rewards in late 2018 when it was put into special measures and its head, Drew Povey, was suspended for allegedly falsifying attendance records. This was business as usual for a series which has long juggled gritty reality with heart-wrenching personal stories and knockabout playground silliness, somehow tying it all up into a neatly inspirational package by the end of the hour.”
Gabriel Tate, The Telegraph

“Perhaps because of their accent – the same as my cousins’ and my dad’s when he gets angry at the football – I warmed to Educating’s most troublesome characters quicker than I should have. The star of this opening episode, Jacob, was a tyke, disrupting classes and teaching his friends how to swear in Spanish. But his middle-aged mannerisms (head nods and expressive hands) and effervescence were endearing, making the bait and switch reveal of his dyslexia diagnosis all the more touching.”
Emily Baker, The i

“The programme makers are meticulous — each shot reveals something, in a child’s expression, their body language or their surreptitious ploys. Nothing goes unobserved. There are no filler shots, no meaningless pans across the schoolyard. Look carefully and you’ll see something going on in every picture.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“This has been a well-acted series about the messiness of life that flickered with moments of excellence amid much implausible melodrama.”
James Jackson, the Times

“In its best season-one episodes, The Twilight Zone spoke to the concerns of the times we live in. Among The Untrodden didn’t reach even these heights, being a tale with a twist, but no real moral. So this has been an inauspicious continuation of an already mildly disappointing series and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jordan Peele’s involvement begins and ends with his narrator role.”
Ellen E Jones, The Guardian