I watched all 4 seasons of Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector.

12 episodes, each more like a film than TV show. Shot in Sweden over ten years.

All 12 are great. If anything, I like the final shows best as Kurt learns he has type 2 Diabetes. And fears he’s going to be facing dementia.

Can he stay at work?

Obviously, Branagh is an excellent actor. He’s been nominated for 5 Academy Awards and 5 Golden Globes.

But I’ve always been slightly turned off by egomania.

That said, for me Wallander is his best work I’ve seen. He won the 2017 International Emmy Best Performance by an Actor for the role.

Click PLAY or get some glimpses on YouTube.

The 6th in his acclaimed Inspector Wallander series.

The series gets better and better, seems to me.

The Fifth Woman:

A sadistic serial killer has been preying on men, beginning with a retired car salesman whose interests appear to be limited to bird watching and poetry and whose body was discovered in a punji stick pit; and continuing with a flower shop manager, found starved and garrotted in the woods.

Wallander soon realises both men have a past record of violence towards women, and after another man is drowned in a lake, he goes on the hunt for an avenging angel…

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I’ve been working my way through the Inspector Kurt Wallander series, starting with Faceless Killers.

Set in Sweden.

Man Who Smiled is #4 — was easily best so far.

Sidetracked #5 almost as good. An intriguing plot, wbell told.

In the sweltering Swedish summer of 1994, a sadistic serial killer begins preying on elderly, successful men, violently slaughtering them with an axe before collecting their scalps as trophies …

I signed up for a free month of Britbox to try Wallander starring Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector.

First episode is based on the #5 book Sidetracked.

Emmy-award-winning director Philip Martin was hired as lead director. Martin worked with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to establish a visual style for the series. …

Like Branagh, Philip Martin did not watch any of the Swedish-language Wallander films so that he could bring a fresh interpretation to the films.

It is well done.

Branagh, born in Belfast, is terrific. Perfect as the flawed detective with many demons.

But Tom Hiddleston tends to steal every scene in which he appears.

It was Branagh who later asked Hiddleston to audition for the film Thor.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

It’s no Game of Thrones, but I’m impressed by many things in this new TV show.

Good cast.

It is cheesy. But I will try the books.

Shadow and Bone is an American fantasy … series based on the Grisha trilogy, the first of which is Shadow and Bone, and the Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo.

… orphan mapmaker Alina Starkov discovers she has an extraordinary power that could be the key to setting her country free from the darkness plaguing it …

There are treacherous forces at play, including a charismatic crew of criminals called the Crows, and it will take more than her new powers to survive it. …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Click PLAY or watch some BEHIND THE SCENES on YouTube.

The White Lioness is the 3rd book in the Inspector Wallander series.

Easily the best, so far.

An intricate and interesting plot.

1992.

… The plot follows two parallel patterns, one during late apartheid South Africa where incumbent president F.W. de Klerk, leader of the Afrikaner minority which is on the brink of losing power to the African majority under the leadership of the ANC, about to end 44 years of suppression by the Broederbond rule.

Simultaneously, Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander is investigating a case of a missing female Methodist real-estate agent …

How could those two things possibly be linked?