First 'The Fall' Season 2 Reviews

From Daily Mirror

The Fall was a rare thing when it aired last year, both critically acclaimed and loved by viewers. 

A gripping psychological thriller that saw DSI Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) try to track down a perverted serial killer in Belfast. 

On the face of it, Paul Spector ( Jamie Dornan ) was a family man. But in reality he was a murderer who was sexually motivated and able to avoid police detection again and again. 

Some viewers complained about sleepless nights and feeling tense after episodes, but it was so gripping they carried on watching nonetheless. 

The second series starts 10 days after Spector's last attack, with the girl involved still alive but struggling to cope or help. 

Whilst Gibson goes about her work tirelessly, Spector's is in the background as a menacing presence. 

Aside from a phone call he barely speaks in the opening 30 minutes, but viewers still know he is very much there, almost like a caged animal. 

And fans of hunk Dornan will love the long lingering shots of him contemplating his next move. 

With Gibson leading the episode, a scene on a train then kickstarts Spector's action towards the climax. 

We may notice change in him in coming episodes, but as DSI Gibson says as she addresses her colleagues: "He is a man who takes his fantasies and turns them into realities." 

There are six episodes instead of five this time around. BBC drama boss Ben Stephenson says it has "gone up a huge level". On the basis of the opening episode, he's not wrong. 

It is far from comfortable viewing, but it is hugely compelling. 

*The second series of The Fall will air on BBC2 this autumn.

The Hollywood Reporter's 'Flying Home' Review

THR - "Fifty Shades of Grey" lead Jamie Dornan stars in this romantic drama from Oscar-nominated Belgian director Dominique Deruddere.

A slick wolf of Wall Street finds himself in a grimy pigeon loft in rural Flanders in Flying Home, an English-language feature from Oscar-nominated Belgian director Dominique Deruddere.

A film that plays like a Lasse Hallstrom adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel, except that neither Hallstrom nor Sparks were involved in any capacity, this classically confectioned melodrama is noteworthy mainly because it offers former Calvin Klein model and future Fifty Grades of Grey star Jamie Dornan his first romantic lead role, which should be enough to attract the interest of smart niche distributors who could time the film’s release to coincide with the avalanche of publicity that Dornan’s involvement in Grey is bound to generate. In its native Flanders, it made a tidy if not spectacular $500,000 when it was released last April.

Competitive pigeon racing in rural Belgium may sound like an unlikely background for a transatlantic, mostly English-language romance but Deruddere finds just the right angle to make it fly. Appropriately, the film opens high up in the clouds, in a private plane that carries Colin (Dornan), a Wall Street whiz kid, to a Middle Eastern emirate, where he'll to try to convince a sheik (Ali Suliman) to invest his billions in a fund run by Colin’s firm rather than that of a rival’s. The oil billionaire has already decided to go with the competition but, as Deruddere slyly suggests, a potentially lucrative business deal is much more important to Colin than sex with a nameless Barbie doll in his fancy, all-glass apartment overlooking a New York skyline (clearly added in post-production).