crime
Amanda Whittington
"Why write about Ruth Ellis?" It’s a question I’ve been asked many times in the run-up to The Thrill of Love and it’s a good one. I’d like to know the answer, too. Three years ago, I was commissioned by the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme to write a play which I suspect is some 30 years in the making. I can trace its beginnings to the mid-Eighties, when I was 17 years old and on high-alert for the kind of gritty icons who graced the singles covers of The Smiths. I discovered Ruth Ellis at the cinema, played so vividly by Miranda Richardson in Dance with a Stranger. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Three years after Jonathan Creek's last one-off special, tellies across the land resounded once again to the strains of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre, a theme tune cunningly chosen to reflect the show's mix of menace, wit and whimsy. Nor had writer David Renwick stinted on the bizarre quirks and fiendish sleights of hand, in a tale featuring a vanishing corpse and an unsolved supernatural mystery from the past, amid a herd of gambolling old thesps having a whale of a time.Chief among these were Nigel Planer and Joanna Lumley as polymath and TV producer Franklin Tartikoff and his Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Pulsating and cinematically proud with an opulent urban palette, Trance positively storms onto the screen. Fast becoming a national treasure (if he hasn't broken through that particular ceiling yet) Danny Boyle is also one of the few directors with the visual chutzpah to make a film this bombastically exciting set in the UK. A heist thriller located in a so-chic-it's-barely-recognisable London, Trance features the handsome trio of James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson and Vincent Cassel. Whilst not quite the mind-fuck it purports to be, it nevertheless challenges you to keep apace with its surging Read more ...
emma.simmonds
You wait years for another interesting Nicole Kidman film and then two come along at once. Two weeks ago it was the elegantly malevolent Stoker and now here's sweaty, shameless noir The Paperboy. It's a film that takes Zac Efron's squeaky clean reputation and quite literally pisses all over it. Or more accurately Kidman does, since Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious features a sequence where the Oscar winner urinates on the jellyfish-stung star of High School Musical. A tawdrily entertaining tale, shot through with youthful lust and romantic delusion, The Paperboy might not deserve to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently on a clear day in the Shetlands, you can see Norway and Iceland. And from about halfway through the first instalment of this Caledonian murder mystery, you could see all the way to the final reel and take a well-educated guess about who did it.I was reading an opinion somewhere the other day that ITV's Broadchurch was an inferior rip-off of such fashionable Scandinavian fare as The Killing or The Bridge. Can't see it myself. Shetland, on the other hand, was riddled with Nordicisms and fit the bill perfectly. Shetland (the place) was even a Norwegian province back in the Middle Ages Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A drama that opens with the disappearance in the woods of a beautiful blonde teenage girl is going to evoke memories of Nanna Birk Larsen racing away from her murderer in The Killing. A drama set in a rural English village peopled by loamy eccentrics and sozzled toffs is likely to summon thoughts of Midsomer Murders. Put ‘em together and what have you got?Mayday is working a nightly hourlong shift across the week. This is an occasional style of scheduling that works well so long as the story grabs the viewer by the throat and refuses to slacken its hold. Five Daughters, about the murder of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
It's about time the world got to know South Korean director Park Chan-wook. His "vengeance" trilogy (and its middle segment Oldboy in particular) made an indelible impression on many but Stoker, Park's frighteningly meticulous English-language debut starring Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode, will considerably broaden his reach. This master of the macabre may have toned it down a tad for his ninth film but the majestic violence and taboo infatuations are pleasingly present and correct. Channelling Winona Ryder's seminally surly teen Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, Wasikowska Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It doesn’t look broken from above. Broken City now and then takes to the skies over New York to look down on the splayed conurbation. Grand views of the skyline find silver towers a-shimmer, blue rivers a-glimmer and autumn’s burnished-bronze trees aflame. Wow, you think, could we stay up here way more and spend a little less time down there in the squalor, the corruption and, worst of all, Allen Hughes’ risible coloured-crayon stylings?You may recall Hughes’s big-screen breakthrough From Hell (2001). Big fan of blood, and the values of the graphic novel. He brings those tropes to an action Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, set in an Italian prison, performed by criminals? If it sounds like a gimmick, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die is anything but. Following a popular tradition of freshening up Shakespeare's works with a shift in setting or location (think 10 Things I Hate About You or Ran), the Tavianis' deft editing creates a lean and intriguing 76 minutes that outstrips three hour epics in meaning and depth.Now in their eighties, the brothers are no strangers to effective cinema, with Padre, Padrone and Night of the Shooting Stars hallmarks of their time. Discovering Julius Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A lot has happened since uncompromising French cop drama Spiral was last on our TV screens in May 2011. More of continental Europe has arrived. Attention has shifted northwards to Denmark for The Killing and Borgen. Sweden’s Wallander and Sebastian Bergman were never far. The Bridge closed the gap between both countries. French contender Braquo threw down the gauntlet too, but it was never going to steal Spiral’s thunder as it was just too cartoony, too brutal to clench to your bosom. Can the return of Spiral, its flawed heroine Captain Laure Berthaud and her scruffbag chic raise the flag Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know Sylvester Stallone didn't do this movie for the money, since he's surfing the career revival wrought by the astounding success of The Expendables. Perhaps he wanted to work with Walter Hill, here directing his first movie in over a decade. Perhaps Sly just prefers working to loafing around the pool in between bouts of weight-lifting.Derived from a graphic novel by French author Alexis Nolent, Bullet to the Head is a strange beast, cynically and relentlessly violent but leavened with some incongruously smart wisecracks. It has a decent cast, but they're offered next to nothing in the Read more ...