The Favourite review

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

The Favourite review

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

'The Lobster' review

Colin Farrell comedy brims with originality, wickedly weird details.

The Lobster review

This macabre drama, starring Rachel Weisz and Colin Farrell, about a hotel where single people must find a mate or be turned into a wild animal starts hilariously but loses its bite.

The Lobster - video review

Xan Brooks, Henry Barnes and Peter Bradshaw review Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos's new satire, set in a world in which single people must couple-up or risk being turned into an animal. The Lobster, which features an ensemble cast including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly and Léa Seydoux, is released in the UK on Friday 16 October.

"Secrets in a marriage are like dry rot in a house," opines newly retired lollipop lady Pauline Paradise (Alison Steadman) to an off-screen interviewer. Her husband Ken (Duncan Preston), slumped beside her on the sofa in a near-permanent state of catatonic disengagement, concurs.

As do the rest of the extended Paradise family, their homes visited in turn by this shamelessly contrived but extremely convenient narrative device, which throws into stark relief the shared veneer of domestic contentment with the cauldron of deceit, disappointment and dissatisfaction bubbling beneath.

There is - you guessed it - trouble in the Paradises, and ITV's new comedy drama Love and Marriage will be here over the next six weeks to chronicle it.

There were an awful lot of Paradises to introduce, with an awful lot of back stories to establish, so episode one was rather obliged to sacrifice subtlety on the altar of exposition.

When characters weren't sharing information with the camera they were frequently to be found telling each other things they already knew - "You were a top model in the 1970s" - for the benefit of viewers at home. During the first 20 minutes, the top-rate cast waded heroically through a mud slide of explanatory dialogue, with the threat of submersion beneath a wave of audience impatience never more than a line away.

Shortly after the first ad break, however, they hit dry land. The storylines kicked in, the dialogue came alive - "She keeps saying my name as if she's never heard it before and doesn't like the sound of it" - and proceedings began to gather a satisfying pace.

The Paradise clan, we learnt, are beset by a multitude of problems - financial, emotional, domestic, professional, romantic, historic - which they look to matriarch Pauline to either solve or shoulder.

Following the accidental death of her father, the much-put-upon Pauline reassesses her life and rejects all the roles imposed upon her. To everyone's amazement, including her own, she ups sticks, moves in with her racy younger sister and starts telephoning potential new suitors at two o'clock in the morning.

Despite its remorselessly jaunty soundtrack, Love and Marriage explored some sombre themes and was all the more interesting for it. Steadman's performance drives the drama, but she has excellent support from a stellar cast that also includes Ashley Jensen, Larry Lamb and Celia Imrie.

If not quite hooked, I shall stick with the series, if only to find out why the Paradise family's quiz team didn't get a point for correctly identifying The Constant Gardener as Rachel Weisz's Oscar-winning vehicle.