The fourth season of beloved cheffy drama The Bear arrives with something to prove. Even though season three received strong reviews, many fans sent that particular dish back to the kitchen. The red-hot tension of the compelling first two seasons had been replaced by a meandering tone and the modest helping of comedy was left off the plate entirely.

• READ MORE: ‘The Bear’ star Lionel Boyce is cooking with gas

Last time we saw Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), he was staring at a very important review of his recently-relaunched restaurant The Bear while the talented Chef De Cuisine Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) was weighing up whether to jump ship or not. Season four of The Bear wastes no time in answering one of these cliffhangers – The Chicago Tribune’s review is scathing, sending the restaurant into a financial tailspin. Given a literal countdown to save the establishment, The Bear’s plucky staff work to become better than ever, while Carmy questions his passion for the job.

The pulse-pounding pressure that was a trademark of the show’s early days hasn’t returned, but its absence makes space for some deeply personal journeys. Lessons have clearly been learned about pacing but showrunners Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo are committed to keeping things introspective.

We see beloved characters working through their issues with more haste than in the previous outing. Marcus (Lionel Boyce) hones his patisserie skills and struggles to reconnect with family, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) bonds with new hire Jessica (Sarah Ramos) and Sugar (Abby Elliott) grapples with motherhood.

On the surface, these may seem like disparate side-quests but as the season progresses, they come together beautifully to define the recurring theme of these new episodes: rediscovering your passion. Episode one begins with a flashback of Carmy discussing his love of restaurants with brother Michael (Jon Bernthal), as the show’s creators remind viewers where this story started.

It gives The Bear a returning sense of focus that makes small moments of humanity feel breathtaking – Ritchie making it snow for a customer, Carmy talking about the “noise” in his head with ex Claire (Molly Gordon). There’s tenderness here that can’t be bellowed over a chopping board.

Edebiri shines the brightest though. Sydney spends a lot of this season hesitating before a giant leap, her insecurity conveyed with a blockbuster mix of humour and heart. Anyone looking for proof that she is the real star of the show only need look at the fourth episode ‘Worms’. Co-written by the actor herself, it’s a delightful standalone story that takes us out of the kitchen and deep into the character’s feelings.

That’s not to say White is surplus to requirements though. There’s a vulnerability to the gruff Carmy as he witnesses the world he created possibly outgrowing him. There are also soul-searching questions about self-sabotage. A series of quiet conversations culminates in a devastating back-and-forth with his mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) that’s as powerful as anything you’ll see on TV this year.

Like Carmy himself, The Bear’s fourth season returns bruised but improved. It may not be a return to its early greatness but this batch of slick, heartfelt episodes proves the show is still capable of delivering some delicious drama.

‘The Bear’ season four is available to stream in the UK on Disney+ now

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Squid Game coming to an end after just three seasons feels like a remarkable feat of restraint. When the South Korean megahit went stratospheric back in September 2021 – rocketing to number one on Netflix in 92 countries and becoming the streamer’s most watched title of all time – that pink and green colour palette infiltrated every corner of popular culture. It even spawned a controversial reality TV recreation in Squid Game: The Challenge and inspired Amazon Prime Video’s record-breaking Beast Games.

• READ MORE: ‘Squid Game’ season two review: Netflix’s survival thriller will wrap its tentacles around you again

Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has decided to hit the brakes after a third and final season to maintain the legacy of the dystopian survival thriller – though we can’t rule out future spin-offs. This last batch of episodes brings “closure to the story I wanted to tell about society through the character of Seong Gi-hun,” he explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

We were first introduced to heroic protagonist Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae) in season one when he, along with 455 other debt-riddled contestants, was recruited into a twisted tournament of children’s games for a chance to win a prize of ₩45.6billion (about £24.8million). The horrifying catch? Failure results in immediate death and only one player could emerge victorious. After winning the fortune, Gi-hun swore to bring down the whole operation. Season two saw him return to the playground battle royale, which ended in a  blazing shootout.

Season three picks back up in the aftermath of the quashed insurrection to find the majority of remaining players still voting themselves deeper into the competition. The new games include a gruesome, hand-to-hand combat take on hide and seek and a gigantic jump rope suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The combination of childlike competitions with brutal life-or-death stakes remains a reliably nauseating trick.

The horror is dialled up even further this season while performances reach unhinged new depths. Contestants must choose whether to depart with their humanity or die trying to escape from the ugliest parts of themselves. It’s a deeply affecting struggle that doesn’t get any easier to watch.

Season three of Squid Game also introduces a newborn baby into the mix, which sparks another wave of questions about right and wrong. Encouraging this carnage are the gleeful VIPs, depicted by masked English-speaking actors who somehow succeed in being even more terrible than their predecessors, with their limited screen time playing like an AI-slop nightmare.

However, the core of this story has always been the contestants and the choices they make. These will often leave you shouting “why?” at your television screen but the show retaliates with a question of its own: does anyone ever stand up to the man and win? It’s a retort that’s bound to leave some fans feeling cheated, though you can’t help but imagine Hwang replying “exactly”. As he explained in a recent interview, “Some stories, by nature, can’t have [a happy ending].”

With the parting reveal that Squid Game is much bigger than just South Korea through an A-list cameo that’ll steal your breath, the relentless cycle of capitalist exploitation and suffering is pulled back into focus. It may all feel like doom and gloom but the final episode is deliberately titled ‘Humans Are…’ It’s left up to the viewer to decide how they fill in that blank.

‘Squid Game’ season three is available to watch on Netflix now

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As The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) finds itself undergoing a reset, 2025 has seen a lot of new heroes step into the spotlight. We’ve got a new Captain America, a New Avengers team in Thunderbolts* and now a pretender to Tony Stark’s techy throne in miniseries Ironheart.

• READ MORE: How Son Lux brought experimental post-rock energy to Marvel’s ‘Thunderbolts*’

Dominique Thorne plays Riri Williams, the young engineering prodigy last seen helping out in 2022’s Wakanda Forever. Her leftfield ideas saw her thrown out of the prestigious MIT, forcing her to return home to Chicago with an Iron-Man-inspired suit she designed in her luggage.

Desperate to emulate Tony Stark but missing his billionaire upbringing, Riri falls in with a criminal gang led by The Hood (Anthony Ramos), a mysterious figure with a cloak powered by magic. Initially thinking she was taking part in victimless crimes, Riri slowly realises what she’s got herself into, and must use her genius to prevent more people dying.

The problem with any new Marvel release is wondering whether you need to have done the homework in order to understand what’s going on. Happily, Ironheart is a largely self-contained show that doesn’t require a degree in superheroes to understand. The story is Marvel’s take on Breaking Bad – a highly driven person with good intentions turns to crime, and soon finds themselves in too deep.

This means Riri avoids the po-faced morality of many heroes and becomes something more complex, with echoes of Tony Stark in Iron Man 3. Rather than valour, her quest to build her suit is born from the grief of losing her stepfather and best friend Natalie (Lyric Ross). She suffers from panic attacks, paranoia and flashbacks; all delivered through a powerful performance by Thorne.

This is where the series overcomes some of the more predictable parts of the plot. Yes, you can probably guess things will blow up in Riri’s face, but there’s a beating heart underneath the steel armour that makes those consequences much more compelling. Series creator Chinaka Hodge (Snowpiercer) gives every character a story, usually set to a terrific soundtrack. You might have seen tech-building montages in the past (“Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps”) but setting one to Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’ gives it a different feeling.

We still get the expected dose of Marvel-style action though, as the audience is treated to a couple of thrilling heists early on. The Hood’s gang is an enjoyable band of misfits, particularly former Ru Paul’s Drag Race winner Shea Couleé as hacker Slug and Sonia Denis’ explosives expert Clown.

Elsewhere, former Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich is fun as a weapons supplier with a link to the MCU’s beginnings. Then there’s Ramos’ The Hood. Yes, his cloak is more than a little dramatic but beneath it, he’s a man possessed by the allure of power with the source of his magic explained in a jaw-dropping final episode reveal.

Overall, Ironheart is a refreshing new antihero, with enough passion and swagger to overcome the more predictable elements of the plot. Some excellent cliffhangers mean there’s certainly more to come from this flawed genius, and that’s no bad thing.

The first three episodes of ‘Ironheart’ are available on Disney+ from today with the second three arriving on July 1

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Summer’s here, so what better time to watch beautiful, awful rich people doing terrible things to each other in exotic locations. If The White Lotus and Sirens arrived too early, the long-awaited Amazon adaptation of E. Lockhart’s young-adult bestseller comes just in time for poolside binge-watching. We Were Liars might be too long, too self-serious and trying far too hard to be Saltburn pushed through the same filter Sabrina Carpenter used for her ‘Espresso’ video, but it’s still a fun teen vacation thriller with an emo heart.

Who wouldn’t want to spend the next few months with the Sinclairs in their mansion on Martha’s Vineyard? This is where Cady (Emily Alyn Lind, Gossip Girl) holidays every year with her cousins Johnny (Joseph Zada, soon to star in The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping), Mirren (Babygirl‘s Esther McGregor) and family friend Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) AKA the Liars. The mums (Caitlin FitzGerald, Mamie Gummer, Candice King) are all money-grabbing, desperate, resentful drunks while the granddad (David Morse) mostly just glares at everyone from a balcony – but the kids are better than all that.

Cady has a crush on Gat, and that’s all anyone has to worry about in their rich, blonde, island paradise – until Cady wakes up on a beach, covered in blood, with no memory of how she got there. The story plays out in two timelines (Cady helpfully dyes her hair brunette in one so we can tell them apart) as secrets get spilled, boys get kissed, bougie lunches get eaten and the past inevitably starts to creep into the present.

Being that the twist ending of the original book traumatised an entire generation of teenage readers, most will already know what’s coming. If you don’t, you’ll guess anyway since subtlety isn’t the language We Were Liars speaks. There are wall-to-wall pop bangers soundtracking every scene, completely unnecessary voice-over narration and over-wrought big reveal moments closing every episode in pretty much the exact same way (“Wait… am I starting to remember something bad?!”)

The kitschiness keeps the darkness away, but the young cast still manage to sell the sweet and sad bits well enough for us to keep on caring about them. It’s just a shame it all runs about twice as long as it probably should with eight drawn-out, hour-long episodes.

Given a tighter edit, We Were Liars could have easily sharpened up its subtext a bit too. This isn’t exactly Succession, but the soft jabs at wealth and power land nowhere. That doesn’t stop the creators from trying though (“Ever since you came back from India you’ve been obsessed with the evils of colonisation!”), and a show this padded with luxury is crying out for someone to rip it all up.

We Were Liars isn’t here to start a revolution though. This is a soppy teen romance with a guilty conscience. It’s I Know What You Did Last Summer meets Gossip Girl. It’s a great advert for having money and it’ll probably earn Amazon enough dosh to green-light a second series.

‘We Were Liars’ is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from June 18

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When trans teenager Byron (Ellis Howard) is banged up for armed robbery, they draw strength from watching charismatic trans woman Nadia Almada win the 2004 series of Big Brother. Paris Lees, who created the riveting What It Feels Like For A Girl from her memoir of the same name, understands that representation can be life-changing. When you see it, you can strive to be it.

• READ MORE: Ellis Howard on the BBC’s “shocking” ‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ adaptation: “I hope it humanises trans stories”

Clearly, What It Feels Like for a Girl is timely and important. Life was tough enough for the Byrons of today before the UK’s Supreme Court ruled in April that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex: a retrogressive decision claimed as a victory by TERFs and right-wing bigots. But this BBC Three drama is also a raw and raucous coming-of-age story that captures the pre-cameraphone hedonism of Nottingham’s Y2K club scene. Lees, who has written for NME, named it after a 2001 Madonna single that got some absolutely banging remixes. Along the way, Lees and her co-writers make salient points about social mobility, sex work and generational trauma.

When we meet Byron, they’re a quick-witted 15-year-old presenting as an effeminate schoolboy. With a chaotic and unstable home life. Byron’s gruff father (Michael Socha) and unreliable mother (Laura Haddock) are only capable of offering conditional love. So, Byron looks for validation and a thin veneer of power by taking on sex work with much older male clients. Byron’s prison sentence is awarded, several episodes later, for their part in robbing a dirty old man who hired them just days after they turned 16.

Howard has previously appeared in TV’s Help and Red Rose, but this is surely his star-making role. He doesn’t just convey Byron’s evolving gender identity with tenderness and empathy, but fully captures the complexities of a teenager who is clever, selfish, exasperating, resilient and incredibly good fun.  Byron finds their chosen family among the Fallen Divas, a clique of queer and trans rabble-rousers who dish out the word “slag” as both a diss and a compliment. Byron bonds instantly with aspiring dancer Lady Die (Laquarn Lewis) but clashes with Sasha (Hannah Jones), an alpha female who’s got plenty of their own sass.

Like its protagonist, What It Feels Like for a Girl embraces chaos as it pings between hallucinogenic club sequences, unsqueamish sex scenes, tender family drama, bawdy comedy and unsentimental glimpses of prison life. But it keeps you enthralled every step of the way. This series unfolds with enormous warmth for its young characters and an infectious nostalgia for a now slightly quaint era of Kappa tracksuits and UK garage bangers. It’s also really funny: when the Fallen Divas go wig shopping, they tell the sales clerks they’re in an S Club tribute act.

It all adds up to bold, brilliant TV with killer parting shots: no one should be written off by the system, and it’s never too late to drag yourself out of a hole. We’re all born kicking and screaming, but What It Feels Like for a Girl reminds us that life can be joyful and exciting even as we fight to survive.

‘What It Feels Like For A Girl’ is out now on BBC iPlayer

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In the bowels of an Edinburgh police station, a mystery is unfolding. Detective Carl Morck (played by Matthew Goode) has returned to the force after surviving an on-the-job shooting that left his partner paralysed and a young cop dead, and has been moved downstairs to head up a new department that solves cold cases. At first, it sounds like a good gig – big budgets, the chance to choose his cases – but the reality of the situation in Dept. Q is soon revealed to be much more bleak.

See, his boss Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie) has siphoned off all the funds for new TVs and computers for her team, meaning Morck’s new office is basically a glorified bathroom in the basement. He also has to learn to soften his harsh tendencies as more misfits join him in his mission.

Grappling with the aftermath of the shooting, Morck and the motley crew that make up his small team land on the case of Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie). The former high-flying lawyer has been missing for four years after disappearing from a ferry in the middle of the sea without a trace. Her disabled brother was the only potential witness to what happened to her.

As with all good crime shows though, there’s the underlying sense that Dept. Q isn’t just about that one solitary case. Every strange story that comes into our periphery feels like it could be connected, such as the identity of Morck’s mysterious shooter. Pieces of the puzzle come together via investigative discoveries and flashbacks to Lingard’s last months, creating a web that’s complex but just gripping enough to be able to follow.

Dept. Q could be the next big crime thriller series, if not for a couple of major flaws. The dialogue – and the delivery of it – often feels wooden and stiff. The suspicious nature of the show excels at making everything and everyone seem eerie. There’s IT worker Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov) who suddenly joins the team and often resorts to the more brutal tactics he picked up on the force in Syria while Lord Advocate Stephen Burns (a steely Mark Bonnar) feels like he’s teed up as the secret shady villain from his first appearance. It makes it hard to root for anyone, be that Lingard and her dark predicament or Morck on his journey to recovery.

The intrigue is enough to keep you watching but it never reaches the addictive heights you might hope for, especially when compared to writer/director Scott Frank’s previous Netflix hit, The Queen’s Gambit.

You won’t spend much time reliving your hours in the dingy basement with Morck after the credits roll. But the nine episodes still have most of the ingredients of a worthwhile watch woven into them, whether you’re a crime junkie or not.

‘Dept. Q’ is streaming on Netflix now

The post ‘Dept. Q’ review: Netflix cop show should be more arresting than it is appeared first on NME.

This scintillating miniseries unfolds at a billionaire’s cliffside compound that doubles as a raptor sanctuary. It’s an enviable stretch of New England coastline where birds of a feather flock together, but don’t always help one another to soar. Driven dropout Simone DeWitt (House Of The Dragon‘s Milly Alcock) has landed her dream job here, working as the live-in assistant to Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), a high-flying lawyer who remade herself as an avian conservationist when she married old-money mogul Peter Kell (Kevin Bacon).

The two women’s relationship is symbiotic and a little bit sinister. When Michaela’s favourite bird of prey flies smack into her eyebrow window – this show will make you Google “eyebrow window” – she snuggles under the covers with her PA like an overgrown child. In episode one, Simone’s manicured life as Michaela’s confidante, running buddy and stage manager – she gives the staff their orders so her boss doesn’t have to – is interrupted by the arrival of her older sister Devon (The White Lotus season two’s Meghann Fahy). “There’s a transient person waiting at the house for you – she’s carrying hot garbage,” underling Missy (Britne Oldford) informs a less than welcoming Simone.

Devon is a freewheeling agent of chaos with possible sex and alcohol addiction issues who wants Simone to come home to blue collar Buffalo, New York, to help with their dementia-stricken father (Bill Camp). She’s unconvinced by her sister’s glossy upper-class makeover (which includes a little plastic surgery, naturally) and thinks Michaela may be operating a bird of prey-themed cult. Given that Simone’s boss is often flanked by “Cloe, Lisa and Astrid”, three interchangeable lackeys who seem to speak in pre-ordained soundbites, this theory isn’t totally outlandish.

Every morning, the Kells’ head chef, Patrice (Lauren Weedman), prepares an inventive post-workout smoothie that Michaela rejects for no good reason. Sirens creator Molly Smith Metzler (also known for helming Maid), who adapted the series from her 2011 stage play Elemeno Pea, is equally adept at blending ingredients. This show has superficial similarities to The White Lotus, notably a derivative title sequence and a healthy disdain for messy rich people, but it soon establishes its own campy tone. Sirens manages to be a soapy murder-mystery – Devon thinks Michaela may have killed her husband’s first wife – while also making sharp observations about class, patriarchy and the limits of sisterhood. It gets away with some whiplash-inducing tonal shifts because it’s always great fun.

When the pace slackens, which isn’t very often over five hour-long episodes, the performances keep you hooked. Both Alcock and Fahy are brilliant at peeling back the layers of women who are more complicated – and even more damaged – than they appear. Smizing dictator Michaela may look like a schlocky role for Moore, an Oscar-winner who generally works with indie directors like Pedro Almodóvar and Todd Haynes, but she imbues it with her usual gift for ambiguity. Is Michaela a monster or actually a bit less monstrous than she seems? Sirens will keep you guessing until the end as these fabulous birds of a feather really show their talons.

‘Sirens’ is streaming on Netflix now

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The Star Wars universe isn’t in a great place at the moment. New films have been planned and canned about as quickly as new TV shows have been rolled out. Some of them have been brilliant, but there’s been a lot – too many, maybe, for the franchise to keep its sense of prestige. Andor returns as a sequel to a prequel to a spin-off, but it’s by far the best Star Wars has been in years.

• READ MORE: ‘Andor’ review: grown-up noir thriller makes for the best Star Wars show yet

You’ll want to catch up if you haven’t already. The first, excellent, season of Andor picked up a loose thread from Rogue One (itself a prequel to 1977’s A New Hope) and told the story of how a thief became a rebel. More gritty and grown-up than everything else in the franchise, Andor was pitched as a serious thriller about the rise of unchecked power. Three years later, in a real-world political climate that sometimes feels more like sci-fi than the movies, Andor returns to double down on everything that made the first season work so well.

“We all have our own rebellion, right?” says one character, framing the theme of the show as everyone struggles to work out what’s worth fighting for. Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is now a rebel guerilla, stealing a prototype X-Wing in the opening and spending a few early episodes trying to steer it back to a small rebel base that’s growing stronger by the day.

Bix (Adria Arjona) is struggling on a deeper level – traumatised by her recent past and now turning to drugs after the threat of sexual violence looms over her again (yep, Star Wars goes there). Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is still trading her own family to try and bring the system down from the inside; Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) is back in deep cover; while Imperial supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) is still stepping on everyone’s head to climb the corporate ladder, including her snivelling new boyfriend, Imperial simp Syril (Kyle Soller).

There are sizeable time skips across the whole season, but the main story rests on the Empire’s efforts to take control of an industrial nation so they can strip mine the rare minerals out of the ground (sound familiar?). Realising they can do it faster if a local “terrorist” opposition gets the right kind of bad press, everyone starts pointing fingers as tensions boil over across the galaxy.

Tony Gilroy’s meaty script gives us a smartened-up Star Wars here, and everything else drips with the same quality – from the taut, brutal action scenes and the detailed production design to a leading cast that excels beyond anything seen in the franchise. O’Reilly and Arjona, especially, give us such starkly grounded emotional performances that it sometimes feels a bit weird when you see a muppet walk past in the background.

Does it cover a bit too much ground? Maybe. Does it dip a bit in the middle? Perhaps. Is Forest Whitaker having a bit too much fun chewing the scenery as brash rebel leader Saw Gerrera? Definitely. But Andor season 2 wears a level of polish that nothing else in the galaxy comes close to matching. Confident, mature and exciting from the off, the last four or five episodes hit the same highs as Rogue One – enriching the bigger story arc instead of ever just feeling like an add-on.

Who knows where Star Wars is headed next, or if any of the many planned shows and films will ever put the franchise back on top, but Andor now feels like the new high-water mark.

‘Andor’ season two is available to watch on Disney+ from 23 April

The post ‘Andor’ season two review: the best Star Wars spin-off gets even better appeared first on NME.

The Last Of Us goes deep narratively and even deeper in its lavish world-building.  The show’s savage vision of a post-apocalyptic America is so completely convincing that when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) strums a few bars of a-ha‘s ’80s megahit ‘Take On Me’, it’s a haunting reminder of the “normal life” that these characters barely remember.

This poignant scene is borrowed from The Last Of Us Part 2, the hugely successful 2020 video game upon which the show’s second season is largely based. It begins five years after the first, which means it’s now a quarter of a century since a parasitic fungal infection turned most of the human race into frothing zombies known as “the infected”.

As you may recall, season one followed stoic smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he escorted the charmingly inquisitive Ellie across an America made treacherous by rival survivors and the bloodthirsty infected. A band of survivors known as the Fireflies believed her blood could save all of humanity but Joel couldn’t go through with the sacrifice and spilt plenty of other people’s blood in the process of rescuing Ellie from her supposed destiny. The new season begins with a lot more peace. Our heroes are safely ensconced in Jackson, Wyoming, a close-knit community protected from the infected by a massive perimeter wall. It’s the dystopian equivalent of a gated development.

Though Ellie is romantically drawn to rebellious Dina (Isabela Merced), the season’s emotional fulcrum is her increasingly fractious relationship with Joel. Put simply: he wants to be her father, but she wants to be his partner in protecting Jackson from the outside world.

Showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann – the latter also co-created the video game – do make some tweaks to the source material. Ellie’s new nemesis Abby (an excellent Kaitlyn Dever) is less enigmatic here, while Catherine O’Hara adds value as Gail, a dry-witted psychotherapist who doesn’t appear in the game.

Describing the overarching storyline is a minefield of spoilers, but the season eventually takes a vengeful Ellie to crumbling Seattle. Here, the army-like Washington Liberation Front, led by Isaac (Jeffrey Wright, reprising his role from the game), are mired in a seemingly futile war with the Scars, a cult-like community who believe humanity’s future lies in going back to basics.

Despite dazzling production values and universally strong performances – Ramsey really captures Ellie’s noble obstinacy – this season is slightly less satisfying than the first. The main problem: an over-reliance on non-chronological storytelling. Though the various time jumps and flashbacks ultimately add to the narrative, they can feel frustrating in the moment. Mazin and his co-writers clearly had to get inventive to balance loyalty to the source material with retaining the key ingredients that made season one a success.

Still, a few fiddly episodes don’t spoil an entire season – especially one driven brilliantly by the fierce heat of vengeance.  At its best, The Last Of Us is unsettling enough to make you question your own hypothetical moral code. When every day is about survival and making sense of post-apocalyptic chaos, does taking a life become easier, or somehow even harder? This show doesn’t just go deep narratively – it also cuts deep emotionally.

‘The Last Of Us’ season two is available to watch in the UK on Sky Atlantic and NOW  

The post ‘The Last Of Us’ season two review: heartbreakingly brilliant apocalypse drama appeared first on NME.

If Netflix deserves a pat on the back for anything, it’s nurturing Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Ever since the streamer liberated it from Channel 4 after season two, the episodes for this twisted near-future look at our interactions with technology have gotten increasingly more complex, daring and loopy. With season seven, they deliver six more slick outings that run the gamut from poignant drama to paranoid fantasy.

The more Black Mirror we get, the more the Brooker-verse grows. And so in ‘Plaything’, we’re back at Tuckersoft, last seen in the head-mangling interactive special Bandersnatch. Will Poulter’s game-creating guru Colin Ritman returns, this time introducing Thronglets, which drives one player (Lewis Gribben and, in later scenes, Peter Capaldi) crazy. It’s a beautifully trippy episode, classic Black Mirror you might say, with a lovely retro feel to the game in question, which is Lemmings meets The Sims by way of Tamagotchis.

In the season finale, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, we return to the fully-immersive space exploration game Infinity, introduced back in season four. Clocking in at 90 minutes, this feature-length episode is the longest of the six, as Brooker unpacks further adventures set in the Star Trek-inspired open-world created by Jesse Plemons’ genius coder. And, yes, that means more of oily CEO James Walton, brilliantly embodied by Jimmi Simpson, who might just be the most unpleasant boss since Elon Musk. With nods to Wrexham F.C. (Ryan Reynolds will be pleased) and Real Housewives Of Atlanta, it’s a comic delight.

As pleasing as it is to see these episodes further expand the world of Black Mirror (there are more Easter eggs than a supermarket stock-take in April), it’s when Brooker and co. explore new ideas that the series really takes off.

In the opener, ‘Common People’, Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones play a married couple forced into a horrifying bind when she undergoes surgery to remove a tumour. Thankfully, holistic new company Rivermind offers a solution: a back-up of her brain in the digital cloud. All very clever, as long as you don’t mind the increasingly annoying restrictions. It’s a very neat satire on contemporary corporate business models that cuts close to the bone.

As painful as that episode can be to watch (and it does get dark), it doesn’t come close to ‘Eulogy’, which sees Paul Giamatti’s lonely soul asked to dredge up memories for the funeral of Carol, a woman he hasn’t seen in years. New tech allows him to enter old photographs to help recall precious moments from long ago. It’s an exceptionally raw process though, given how Carol broke his heart. Bringing plenty of gravitas to the tale, Giamatti, the Oscar nominee from last year’s The Holdovers, proves that he’s one of the best actors around with this superb performance.

Unsurprisingly, Brooker weighs in on the AI debate that has been raging across Tinseltown for the past few years. In ‘Hotel Reverie’, we see ailing movie studio Keyworth Pictures agree to ‘remake’ their eponymous Casablanca-like black-and-white classic using a real-time simulation that allows them to plant a new actor, Brandy Friday (Issa Rae), into the movie as it runs in real time. With some neat Hollywood gender-flipping, she replaces the male star, meaning she’s suddenly romancing Emma Corrin’s character Dorothy. Smart, sassy filmmaking.

Perhaps the best and most bonkers episode is ‘Bête Noire’. Maria (Siena Kelly), a food researcher working for a confectionery company, gets a shock when old schoolmate Verity (Rosy McEwen) wins a job at her company. An outcast back in the playground, Verity now seems to be the most popular kid in town, which starts to do Maria’s nut in. McEwen and Kelly make for worthy adversaries in this tale about absolute power.

A typically eclectic soundtrack features everything from The Stone Roses to Amyl And The Sniffers), perfectly symbolising the variety on offer across these six episodes. Brooker’s sharp-eyed intelligence and eerily prophetic lens on society is also very much in tune. It’s not all about the twists either. These news episodes, especially the cine-literate ‘Hotel Reverie’, merit a second viewing – but that is par for the course in the Brooker-verse. As they say in the final episode, “a tiger cannot change its stripes”.

‘Black Mirror’ season seven is available to watch now on Netflix

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