wed 25/12/2024

crime

Death in Paradise Christmas Special, BBC One review - who killed Santa Claus?

Though Death in Paradise is an Anglo-French production filmed in Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, the Frenchness seems to have mysteriously leaked away. Where Sara Martins was a long-standing regular as DS Camille Bordey, and other French...

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Sujo review - cartels through another lens

It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience...

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Until I Kill You, ITV1 review - superb performances in a frustrating true-crime story

The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half...

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Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for Miller's Mob

How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on...

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Jonathan Coe: The Proof of My Innocence review - a whodunnit with a difference

Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance...

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London Film Festival 2024 - Nickel Boys, crime and punishment and Ukraine

RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves...

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Ludwig, BBC One review - entertaining spin on the brainy detective formula

The latest incarnation of David Mitchell, TV actor, looks at first sight much like the familar one from Peep Show and Back. Not a pufflepant in sight. His only costume change for Ludwig is a pair of wire-frame spectacles. HIs role is...

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Joan, ITV1 review - the roller-coaster career of a 1980s jewel thief

If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely. Written by Anna Symon, this six-part series is based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington, whose light-fingered accomplishments earned her...

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Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low

“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps...

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Nightsleeper, BBC One review - strangers on a runaway train

“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing...

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The Perfect Couple, Netflix review - an inconvenient death ruins lavish Nantucket wedding

Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral...

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Sambre: Anatomy of a Crime, BBC Four review - satisfying novelistic retelling of a French true crime saga

Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for...

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