The Favourite review

Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone put in career-best performances in Yorgos Lanthimos' period comedy masterpiece.

Olivia Colman wins best actress award in Venice

British star honoured for her role as Queen Anne in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos's quirky period comedy The Favourite. The film also won the grand jury prize, the festival's second-most prestigious.

Review: The Favourite - cheeky and hilarious

All this bawdiness and chicanery would be entertaining enough, but it is given a raucous spin by Lanthimos, working from a very funny original screenplay.

The Favourite review

Yorgos Lanthimos brings scabrous energy to this dark comedy of 18th-century court intrigue and Colman excels herself.

How Flowers tackles mental health with humour

"He's trying to wrestle with his new equanimity, a new peace of mind," says Julian Barratt of Maurice, the melancholic children's author he plays in Channel 4's cult comedy-drama, Flowers, which returned for a second series earlier this month. "But, really, it's catching up with him. It's catching up with all of them."

Flowers returned for a second one-off, glorious, maddening week (all six episodes shown on consecutive evenings). First shown over a similar week in 2016, it is, if you remember - and if you watched it back then, you will - an exceedingly quirky week in the company of the Flowers clan, with a dank underbelly of quietly desperate depression. It is almost indefinable, certainly impossible to shoehorn into any known genre - but it's constantly and crazily inspired, inventive, gloomily funny. It will drive some people to dark places. It will drive some people to reach for the off button.

This outing was even odder, and even better. Julian Barratt and Olivia Colman excel as a depressed children's writer and his increasingly estranged wife, who is struggling to remember what she's for, apart from caustic disillusionment, which allows her to come out with some winningly cruel lines. After Barratt has mused again on his "major depressive disorder", she snaps: "Oh, just call it depression, Maurice. It's not a Nobel prize."

But they are relatively in the shadows as regards their children, the unimaginative failure Donald and his sis Amy, who was struck by lightning last time round. Daniel Rigby and Sophia Di Martino are sublime in their characters, with Amy hard to watch as she descends - via some crackling lines ("At least I don't have to watch you piss your scent all over the moral high ground like some demented incontinent barn animal") - to febrile madness.

As to what it's about, apart from Amy's visions of cursed German ancestors... I think it was, in the end, about something rather serious happening to Shun, the Japanese houseboy/illustrator played by Will Sharpe, the writer/creator, and himself bipolar. But I can't be sure. And I only think this because, after Shun was left contemplating, with quickening melancholy, a tall tree in the penultimate episode, the entire last one was a series of his flashbacks to his first few days in the Flowers household - a joyous, flowery, celebration of a loopy, tangled, untidy English family in the English countryside, all dusk and drink and beauty and looming shadow. As I say, indefinable, but sometimes indefinably lovely. And a brave recommission from C4, with brave issues tackled.

Flowers, series 2 review

Fiercely imaginative and emotionally truthful

C4's Flowers is much more than just a 'dark comedy'

Flowers, which ran all week on Channel 4, was thrillingly good to watch -- but is, I now realise, extremely tricky to summarise.

Flowers series 2 preview

It is certainly a one-of-a-kind programme that will stay with you.

Flowers, episode 1 and 2, review

Rejoice as this melancholy curio blooms once again.