Dale Reynolds

NORDIC NOIR: STORIES TO FJí„LLBACKA These three Swedish murder mysteries by the best selling Camilla Låckberg are a mixed lot, but still worth a visit. Born in 1974, the í¼ber-successful author has seen her stories filmed quite a bit for television, with all of her mysteries set in the Swedish town of Fjållbacka and nearby…

KILLER NOVA EPISODE A thoroughly engrossing documentary on how extreme volcanoes can – and do — influence global climate change, specifically in adding sulfuric acid and ash into clouds which the winds blow everywhere, causing temperatures to drop, for months or years at a time. The producers wanted to find out how a thirteenth-century English…

OOH-LA-LA Five thousand years of Parisian history is beautifully explored in this two-disc French-produced journey with English narration. The City of Light was originally a small Gallo-Roman village next to the river Seine and near the river Marne, named Lutetia-Parisorum after the tribe known as the Gallic Parisii, and was renamed Paris in 360 CE…

SOME FACTS UNEARTHED WHILE SOME REMAIN BURIED The ultimate reason for the poet/short-story writer Edgar Allen Poe’s demise at age 40 was not clear in 1849, when the press reported his death, nor is it totally clear today, although this documentary by Eric Stange attempts to make it so. Broadcast this year on PBS’s American…

I’VE LOOKED AT WAR FROM BOTH SIDES NOW As a producer/director, Ken Burns is an artist of such high value on so many levels that he cannot be over-praised. For the past thirty-six years he has produced extraordinary documentaries which have educated, enlightened and entertained. Beginning with Brooklyn Bridge  (1981) Burns’s amazing array of films includes  The…

MOVE OVER BOND AND BOURNE; HAMILTON’S IN TOWN These two hard-hitting spy thrillers, filmed in 2012, are based on well-known novels by the French-Swedish journalist, Jan Guillou (b. 1944), who wrote ten novels in all. There are other adaptations since 1989, starring among others, Stellan Skarsgí¥rd and Stefan Sauk, but these are the only two…

A SERIES YOU CAN’T REFUSE The Italian TV series Detective Montalbano Â (Il commissario Montalbano) has lasted eighteen blessed years. Since 1999, Detective/Commissario Salvo Montalbano (Luca Zingaretti)’â€56, stocky, well-built, and handsome’â€has loved, of all things, solving local crimes, mostly murder, and not all committed by the Mafia. Beautifully shot, the show glamorizes Sicily, not generally a showcase…

NOT SO PRIME For the few who don’t know, Prime Suspect is the well-loved cop-show game-changer from MASTERPIECE on PBS. The series, which ran from 1991-2006 starring a glorious Helen Mirren, now has a prequel.  Series creator Lynda La Plante’s  2015 novel Tennison  is the basis for this newest six-part television mini-series, but she abandoned the adaptation, which…

A ROYAL PERFORMANCE When British actor Tim Pigott-Smith died this past spring a month shy of his 71st birthday, the Community of Actors lost a legend. He came to fame three decades ago in The Jewel in the Crown,  the dazzling series about the end of British rule in India.  A consistently working actor, his last role…