Bylined reviews with verdicts and scores — newest first. Showing 649–672 of 960 reviews.
★★★★★
HBO's The Wire widens a Baltimore drug case into a five-season sociological epic — police, dealers, dockers, teachers, politicians and journalists — dramatizing with novelistic rigour how institutions grind down the people inside them.
★★★★½
Kingdom transplants the zombie outbreak to Korea's Joseon era, fusing sumptuous period intrigue with relentless undead horror — a lavish, politically pointed genre triumph that reinvents a tired form.
★★★★★
Apple TV+'s Pachinko braids decades of Korean diaspora history into a single family's endurance, colour-coding its Korean and Japanese dialogue to make the politics of language itself part of the drama.
★★★★☆
China's Story of Yanxi Palace follows a sharp-witted maid who refuses to be a victim as she outmanoeuvres the Qing court from the bottom up — a slick, addictive palace drama that became one of the most-watched series on the planet.
★★★★☆
Apple TV+'s Ted Lasso weaponizes relentless kindness, dropping a folksy American coach into English football to build a comedy about emotional honesty that struck a genuine cultural nerve — sharpest in its near-perfect early seasons.
★★★★☆
Coralie Fargeat's The Substance weaponizes prosthetic body horror against Hollywood's cult of youth, letting a fearless Demi Moore wage war on a younger copy of herself — a gleefully grotesque provocation that builds to pure prosthetic delirium.
★★★★★
Better Call Saul inherits Breaking Bad's world and rejects its velocity, filming the moral erosion of Jimmy McGill in long, patient compositions where the tragedy is that we already know the ending.
★★★★★
Breaking Bad is the most rigorously constructed character study television has produced — a Western dressed as a crime drama, tracking one man's transformation from cornered everyman into apex predator with the merciless logic of a chemical reaction.
★★★★★
Germany's Dark spins a child's disappearance into a labyrinthine, multi-generational time-travel epic of interlocking families and cosmic determinism — one of the most intricately engineered and rewarding science-fiction series ever made.
★★★★★
Prime Video's Fleabag turns direct address into a formal masterstroke, making the audience the confidant of a grieving, self-sabotaging woman — a filthy, devastating tragicomedy whose second season is close to perfect.
★★★★☆
China's Joy of Life sends a young man with a hidden past through the lethal politics of a fictional empire, leavening its court intrigue with sly modern wit — a sprawling, unexpectedly funny costume epic that became a mainstream juggernaut.
★★★★★
Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig turns a Tehran judge's missing pistol into a suffocating domestic thriller — an allegory of authoritarian paranoia made under real threat of imprisonment, and smuggled out of Iran.
★★★★½
Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain sends two mismatched cousins on a Holocaust heritage tour of Poland, measuring inherited trauma against the smallness of everyday hurt — a slim, aching comedy-drama that hands Kieran Culkin the role of a lifetime.
★★★★½
Netflix's Baby Reindeer turns Richard Gadd's real experience of being stalked into an unsparing study of trauma, complicity and self-loathing — a limited series that refuses the comforts of victimhood and became a global phenomenon.
★★★★☆
Spain's Money Heist built a worldwide phenomenon out of red jumpsuits, Dalí masks and an endless supply of last-second reversals — a pulpy, adrenalized heist saga that is irresistible even when it overstays its welcome.
★★★★★
Apple TV+'s Severance is not a mystery box to be solved but a philosophical machine, using the sterile geometry of corporate space to stage the oldest question in cinema: who are we when no one is watching?
★★★★☆
China's The Knockout traces two decades of a dogged cop and the fishmonger who rises to rule an organised-crime empire — a gritty, sweeping anti-corruption saga that became the runaway television event of its year, powered by a mesmerising villain.
★★★★½
HBO's The Last of Us proves a great game can become great television by trusting its quietest instincts — swapping set-piece horror for the slow, unbearable tenderness of two people learning to matter to each other.
★★★★☆
Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man gives Sebastian Stan a cure for his facial difference and then hands the life he wanted to another man who never sought it — a slippery, wickedly ironic fable about identity, envy and the lie of transformation.
★★★★☆
Japan's Alice in Borderland drops a directionless gamer into an eerily emptied Tokyo where survival depends on winning sadistic games — a slick, propulsive thriller that pairs its deadly puzzles with real emotional stakes.
★★★★½
Peacock's Poker Face revives the Columbo-style 'howcatchem' as a rebuke to a decade of grim serialized prestige — a self-contained, road-trip mystery carried by Natasha Lyonne's rumpled human lie-detector.
★★★★☆
France's Lupin reimagines Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief as a modern con man avenging his father, and rides the sheer magnetism of Omar Sy to become one of Netflix's biggest non-English hits.
★★★★½
Adam Elliot's Memoir of a Snail is a painstaking claymation memoir of a lonely, hoarding misfit that finds startling warmth in the bleakest material — melancholy, wickedly funny and voiced with real feeling by Sarah Snook.
★★★★★
Jesse Armstrong's Succession weaponises the restless handheld camera and the withheld reaction shot to turn corporate warfare into a King Lear for the age of private jets — the finest ensemble drama of its decade.
