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Starring: Graham Norton and guests: Cher/Keira Knightley/Michael Fassbender/Josh Brolin/Jalen Ngonda (2024)

Helen begins a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is. Caught in the crosshairs when her lover falls victim to the dangerous London underworld, Helen’s employer calls on Sam to protect her. Bingo, the owner of the guitar shop where Sam gets his guns, is played by Rat Scabies from The Damned.

A New York Story Written by Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan Performed by The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl

This 6-part Netflix spy thriller promised a lot, but ultimately fell short of what it could have been. With a top-notch cast including Keira Knightley as the ninja-punching, gun-wielding action heroine, and Ben Whishaw as her former mentor and now colleague, expectations were high. Both are employees of the super-secret mercenary spy organization Black Doves, led by Sarah Lancashire, who does her best to portray a Judi Dench "M" impersonator in a hideous platinum blonde wig.

The trio worked together, but alone, trying to uncover some grand conspiracy

It certainly starts with a bang when we see three young people murdered in central London. There is a separate plot thread surrounding the off-screen death of the Chinese ambassador to Britain, whose partisan daughter has also gone missing, threatening various international political conflicts. Not surprisingly, the two events later coincide, both stories overlap Knightley and Whishaw’s activities, not least because, in addition to marrying the government’s defense minister, she was also caught up in political conflicts over the death of the ambassador, and she had a passionate affair with one of the three originally murdered.

While everything was resolved by the end , I felt it was somewhere between James Bond-type fantasy and Le Carre-type realism, and escapism unfortunately won out in the end

other characters are drawn into the kaleidoscopic narrative as Knightley and Whishaw are drawn deeper and deeper into the increasingly inscrutable plot, with a mountain-sized cluster of bodies gathering around and around them, sometimes in their arms, while Whishaw still has time to rekindle an old romance . Sharply directed, with an authentic cast of A-list stars, it somehow failed to deliver on its early promises for me, floundering with an overly tense plot that relied too much on coincidence, gun violence, and quirky, unconventional characters. When I started watching, I felt that almost all of the remaining episodes seemed good at first, but I’m afraid that by episode four, cracks began to appear that no amount of sharp dialogue and quick jokes could make up for (and there were some).

Again, tense and the thrilling ending was heightened, although it relied heavily on exposition and didn’t seem to know when to stop

this even happened with a Christmassy “Die Hard”-type twist, but in the end it all felt too contrived and confusing to really work – A whole host of new movies and TV shows are streaming on Netflix this month.