By Jack Cracker and Bob Korn
Actor Suranne Jones
HOSTAGE (2025)
Newbie:
Some thrillers want to dazzle with spectacle. Hostage—the limited series created by Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies), directed by Isabelle Sieb and Amy Neil—prefers dread and claustrophobia. Its setup is stark: the British Prime Minister’s husband is abducted overseas, and the crisis detonates in the corridors of power.
At the center is superbly cast Suranne Jones as Prime Minister Abigail Dalton. She’s freshly elected, and Jones plays her as both stateswoman and human being—commanding across the Cabinet table, fragile in private moments. The performance carries the show.
She’s not alone. Ashley Thomas is Alex Dalton, the husband whose kidnapping sparks the chain reaction. Isobel Akuwudike plays Sylvie Jane Anderson, the PM’s daughter, who forces the story to widen beyond politics into family anguish. Julie Delpy is icy and sharp as Vivienne Toussaint, the French President, a rival wrapped in silk. Corey Mylchreest plays her stepson Matheo, restless and reckless. Lucian Msamati as Chief of Staff Kofi Adomako brings grounded calm. And James Cosmo as Max Dalton, Abigail’s proud but frail father, injects history and generational weight. It’s an ensemble with real gravity.
Much of the series’ impact comes from its 10 Downing Street set. The detail is uncanny—portraits, parquet, even the squeeze of the stairwell. It looks and feels like a seat of government under siege. The cinematography (uncredited publicly so far) leans into muted tones, narrow frames, and long silences. Negotiations stretch like piano wires, so that when violence arrives, it feels brutal, not routine.
If the plot occasionally over-stuffs itself with subthreads, the emotional line is clean. The story keeps circling the same question: how do you lead when your family is collateral? Watching Abigail shift between public firmness and private fracture is the series’ central tension.
The payoff comes not in explosions but in a single small collapse: the Prime Minister alone, finally letting her guard drop. No news crews, no aides—just a human being who’s carried too much. That moment is the series’ loudest line, and it’s whispered.
Hostage proves that a thriller doesn’t have to sprint to be gripping. Sometimes the most unnerving thing is the quiet, and the knowledge that power, at its core, is just people under impossible strain.
Jeremy Irons in Lisbon
THE NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON (2013)
Oldie:
Jeremy Irons ticket to ride is a first class train ticket along memory lane. There are thrillers, and then there are meditations disguised as thrillers. Bille August’s The Night Train to Lisbon is firmly in the latter camp.
Directed with restraint by August, photographed with sunlit melancholy by Filip Zumbrunn, the film is adapted from Pascal Mercier’s bestseller.
Brilliantly cast, Jeremy Irons plays Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss professor who rescues a mysterious woman one rainy morning and ends up boarding a train to Lisbon on a whim. What he finds is not action but excavation—the life and writings of Amadeu de Prado (played in flashbacks by Jack Huston), a doctor-poet entangled in Portugal’s resistance to Salazar’s dictatorship.
The cast is stacked with heavyweights who wear their years well: Charlotte Rampling as Amadeu’s brittle sister, who is a devote keeper of secrets, Bruno Ganz as a steadfast comrade, Tom Courtenay, Mélanie Laurent, Lena Olin, even Christopher Lee in a late cameo. They embody a generation trying to square with what they did—or failed to do—when history came calling. Lisbon itself is the film’s co-star. Zumbrunn’s camera lingers on tiled walls, yellow trams, and alleys that look washed in regret.
This is a film that loves its city and uses it as a mirror for Gregorius’s awakening.
The professor, who has lived too long in books and routine, discovers that history isn’t just in archives; it’s etched into people’s faces. Some critics groused that the film is too talkative. Fair enough—but that’s like complaining that a wine tasting involves too much sipping. The point here is reflection, not chase scenes.
Irons, with his cultivated fatigue and precise diction, makes a late-life intellectual quest feel both believable and moving.
What stays with you isn’t a grand revelation but the accumulation of small ones: the tremor in Rampling’s voice, the resolve in Ganz’s eyes, the quiet awe on Irons’s face when he realizes that it’s never too late to step on a train and ask the larger questions. The Night Train to Lisbon is not for those in a hurry. But if you’re willing to slow down, it rewards you with a meditation on memory, courage, and the stubborn endurance of love. It's worth the trip.
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