The Gold; Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs; Ukraine from Above; Go Hard or Go Home

“If you tune out of the (many) working-class warrior speeches and quell any queasiness that hardened criminals are being reframed as loveable rogues, it’s a rollicking good drama. I’m loving Dorothy Atkinson as Jeannie with the bad eyeshadow, and James Nelson-Joyce as Brian Reader in the bad wig, even though their rather naive portrayal as “all right, darlin’ ” working-class Londoners occasionally grates.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“This retelling of the hunt for the Brink’s-Mat gold is still in hot pursuit of its narrative about class inequality, exemplified by private educations and rhyming slang. ‘People like us, we have to fight twice as hard to get anything in this world,’ declared Kenneth Noye (Jack Lowden), who might be more at home on a soapbox at Hyde Park Corner.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs. Why are there so many dinosaur documentaries around? If you’re a palaeontologist, you’ve probably got a queue of TV crews at your door. It wouldn’t be so bad if these shows were distinctive, but Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs (BBC Two) was a retread of things we’d seen in other documentaries in the last few weeks.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“We learned much palaeontology trivia: dinosaurs could catch a type of bird flu; fossils and rocks sound differently when tapped with a knife; diplodocus could walk at 15mph; monkey puzzle trees have been around for 150 million years. But the one detail that really caught my attention was that fossils will stick to your tongue if you lick them, because of the pores in the bone. Who was the first scientist to slurp a dinosaur skeleton, I wonder?”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“Ukraine from Above is not just about the filth of conflict, as captured by drone cameras. It concerns a kind of asymmetric warfare in which the drone camera is a weapon. We see how – at least in the early phases of the invasion, before much heavyweight western hardware had made it across the border – the mighty Russian conquest machine was repeatedly banjaxed by hobbyists using kit you could’ve bought in the Kharkiv branch of Currys.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“A worthwhile film, then, if not a particularly special one – it is a European-made production and feels like a collection of scenes stitched together with a narration thrown over. The BBC’s Ukraine: The People’s Fight was a vastly superior effort, in which film-maker Olly Lambert was embedded with Ukrainian fighters. While his film celebrated the courage of those who have joined the frontline, it also acknowledged the setbacks they have faced. Ukraine from Above presented an overly simplistic picture of unalloyed military success.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“There was an undeniable charm to it all. Jordan North, Radio 1 DJ and former I’m A Celeb runner-up, is the perfect presenter, offering up genuine camaraderie as someone who has also completed mad challenges for a TV game show, and a huge amount of fun has clearly been had in the editing suite. Dramatic music, slow motion and gratuitous shots of crashing waves, gave the whole thing rather a camp undertone (no bad thing).”
Rachael Sigee, The i