crime
Adam Sweeting
Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. When in Never Here New York conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) finds a stranger’s phone, she uses it as the basis for her next art show, tracking down and interviewing the owner’s contacts, listening to his music and using his GPS history to retrace his steps. She lives in a private bubble of self-regard, and is shocked when her subject is hurt and angered by her crass exploitation of his privacy. “You’ve done a bad thing,” he tells her at the show’s launch party.Miranda comes out with fatuous nuggets of pseudobabble like “circumstances Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.In last week’s opening episode, he was forced to conquer his terror of leaving the ground by the traumatic news that his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) had been killed in a road accident. As soon as he arrived in Hong Kong, everything looked exceedingly fishy Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.The authorities of the wider conurbation provoke distrust – kickbacks and dirty Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it is bookended by heaving get-togethers in which sound systems pulse and throb. But there are no subtitles and one of the film’s pleasures, alongside the music of the soundtrack, is the music of the dialogue.For his debut behind the camera, Idris Elba has adapted the 1992 novel by Victor Headley about a young man tasked with the age-old choice Read more ...
Robert Carsen
In the time of composer John Gay, greed and self-interest were the main motives for life; and his work The Beggar’s Opera is an open critique on the way that society behaved. The work’s opening number sets the tone, basically saying: “we all abuse each other, we all steal from each other, we all want to get as much as we can and to hell with everybody else.”As the story develops we get endless examples of this attitude – particularly from the status quo officials who don’t seem to care where their money is coming from or whether people are innocent, so long as their pockets are lined. Yet Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t make boxers like Freddie Mills any more. A granite lump of grinning charisma, he had a brow and jawline straight from a kids’ cartoon and, despite his humble origins and thuggish contours, a charmingly well-to-do voice. Mills was light heavyweight world champ for a time, then drifted into showbiz and, eventually, running a nightclub in Soho. Then he died in sudden and mysterious circumstances.His body was found in the back of his Citroen on the night of 24 July 1965. There was a single shot from air rifle through his right eye, from which dangled a lone blob of congealed blood. The Read more ...
Owen Richards
Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a unique and sometimes unsettling cinematic experience.Luna (Julia Jedlikowska, pictured below) is a rather typical 12-year-old girl: precocious, imaginative, and very much infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe. Although they don’t have the same interests, they share something deeper, a comfort and belonging in each other’s company. On the walk home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some contend that this Snowdonia-set mystery was a Scandi hommage too far, a mere recycler of gloom-shrouded riffs familiar from the likes of The Bridge or The Killing. Well yes, there was that element to it, but if you stuck with it it grew into far more than a mere copycat procedural.For a start, it wasn’t your average whodunnit, since the killer’s identity was made pretty clear as early as the first episode. Instead, the eight-part series was more of a whydunnit, as the screenwriters probed methodically into the background, motivation and psychology of Dylan Harris (Rhodri Meilir, pictured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga. The understated rapport of lead duo DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) has become one of TV’s mini-treasures, and it was all present and correct in this opening episode.It started, as these things often will, with the discovery of a body. Workmen were digging a drainage trench at the bottom end of the M1 when they chanced upon what turned out to be a human hip bone. The rest of the skeleton wasn’t far away, and soon forensic bods were poring Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations. Happily – albeit depressingly given its corrosively dark subject matter – it exerts its grip with increasing force, once you’ve committed yourself to stick with it past the first couple of episodes.Mining the kind of steamy, silently menacing American hinterland also exploited by the likes of True Detective or Justified, Sharp Objects whisks us to the small town of Wind Gap, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Force of Evil is much more than a stunning film noir classic: it’s first and foremost a film about money and power and their tragic power of attraction. Set in the world of the numbers racket in New York, where the big combinations, created by gangsters who've barely gone legit, are pitted against the smaller "banks", or players. This Hobbesian struggle feeds off the lesser but still significant desire of the betting man on the street, driven by hopeless dreams and always close to the breadline.The story, based on a novel by Ira Wolfert, and adapted by Polonsky himself for his first film as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perfectly timed, in theory, for the advent of #MeToo and Hollywood’s post-Weinstein era, this girl-power redesign of the Ocean franchise has lined up a turbo-charged cast and then not given them anything very interesting to do. Director and co-writer Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Free State of Jones) was probably wise not to try to replicate the sleight-of-hand plotting, laconic wit and stiletto-sharp editing of Stephen Soderberg’s Ocean flicks, but the unfortunate consequence is that Ocean’s 8 often ends up lapsing into a glammed-up vacuum.The set-up is that Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock Read more ...