crime
Adam Sweeting
There comes a time when every successful formula can do with an overhaul, and that particular bell may be tolling for Unforgotten (ITV). Regular viewers will be familiar with writer Chris Lang’s modus operandi – a corpse (usually grotesque and of indeterminate age) is discovered, and before you can say “autopsy” cold case experts Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sajeev Bhaskar) are poking around in the innards. Then they track down a network of potential suspects who were connected with the deceased.This latest case adheres to the blueprint with unswerving exactitude, though it’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament was, therefore, a lovely surprise: well-paced and earnest without taking itself too seriously, it’s a new interactive experience from Les Enfants Terribles, the company known for madcap, immersive work like their 2016 Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returned the following year). Don’t be fooled by Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on a book by Roberto Saviano, author of the Neapolitan gang saga Gomorrah, ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic) is an account of the international drugs trade and the way its tentacles wrap themselves around the entrails of societies at all levels. It’s a lavishly-mounted and beautifully photographed production with the feel of a big-budget movie like Sicario or Traffic, knitting together storylines in Mexico, New Orleans and Calabria in south-west Italy.It’s also a story riddled with sadistic violence and torture and may not be everyone’s idea of escapist lockdown viewing, but it exerts a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Film is the new theatre – this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story? The latest example of this problematic switch from stage to screen is the strongly acted Shook, Samuel Bailey’s debut play, which won the 2019 Papatango New Writing Prize and had a run at the Southwark Playhouse in November of that year. Although its planned transfer to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End was curtailed when the pandemic hit, the drama has been superbly filmed and is available to watch online on the Papatango website.Set in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a happy ending (or at least not the bloodbath that had threatened to erupt).A series of Spiral often takes a few episodes to crank up a full head of steam, as this one did, but once character, situation and plot start to knit together, it has been as tense and addictive as anything on TV. The story of Moroccan teenager Amin, whose murdered body got the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried out by a pair of seemingly unwitting women at Kuala Lumpur airport by smearing Jong-nam (pictured below) with VX nerve agent.Ryan White’s documentary about Jong-nam’s death may contain material familiar to keen conspiracy fans, but it’s still an extraordinary story. White has buttressed his narrative with accounts from witnesses and lawyers, as well Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet down next. Devised by Hans Rosenfeldt, the macabre maestro behind Scandiland’s The Bridge, this third series might be the darkest and nastiest yet.Slightly disorientatingly, the whole caboodle has now been shunted out of London and across to Belfast. That’s also where Line of Duty is filmed, but whereas Jed Mercurio’s labyrinthine creation carefully Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“They’re only rich assholes.They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he steals passports and money from a couple of unconscious tourists he’s just drugged on a beach in Thailand in the mid-Seventies.“Free your mind from bourgeois sentiments. You’re above all this,” he encourages her. This is the first time that she begins to realise what she’s got herself into, having left Quebec for Asia and the love of a not-so-good Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which doesn't so much derive suspense from withholding information as revel in an opaque narrative that I, for one, tuned out of well before the close. There's no denying Brosnahan's commitment to material that couldn't be further from her star-making work in TV's The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, but you can only tease a spectator along so far before one's patience Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add the Hampstead Theatre to the swelling ranks of playhouses opening its doors this month, in this case with a revival well into rehearsal last spring when the first lockdown struck. Re-cast in the interim, Alice Hamilton's 60th-anniversary production of The Dumb Waiter finds the menace in a defining play from the early career of Harold Pinter, without catching the linguistic brio that in other hands can give this same text an often-surprising lift. Running just under an hour, this play was last revived in London at the start of 2019, as part of a double bill and bringing to near- Read more ...