legal drama
Nick Hasted
Two knotted horrors stained West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Three 8-year-old boys, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore, went cycling on a sunny spring afternoon. Their torn, bruised and in Byers’ case castrated bodies were dragged from a stream the next day. Three local teenage boys, black-garbed outsiders Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., were then tried for the crimes with a carelessness, incompetence and prejudice which seemed actively malicious. This “West Memphis Three” sacrificed 18 years in jail, as authorities who had in some cases risen to power Read more ...
David Nice
Hands Over the City is to Naples at a crucial point in its 20th-century history what Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta is to the Italian capital and Visconti’s La terra trema to the Sicilian coast. Francesco Rosi’s decision to capture the only boom that Italy has ever really known in the early 1960s is an uncompromising film about the energy that directs itself to bad ends.Its embodiment is Rod Steiger’s Eduardo Nottola, a councillor who embroils city housing plans in his own profiteering property development. "So what’s new, or rather old?" you might ask. And indeed the film remains pertinent Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In between the second series of Silk and this new one, Peter Moffat took time out to write his rural-misery-and-cannon-fodder dirge, The Village. Having off-roaded so far from his usual track, perhaps it's no wonder that his return to the world of wigs, hypocrisy and legal sophistry felt a fraction off the pace.Last time we were loitering with intent around the nooks and corridors of Shoe Lane Chambers, we were sucked into a dystopian vortex of corruption and venality where just about everybody seemed to be compromised or on the take. Not least the legal system itself, with the noble Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The annual reappearance of The Good Wife is always a cause for celebration. Why they persistently park it in the twilight zone of More4 remains one of the enduring mysteries of our era, since it's one of the best shows on TV, but the only question that need concern us is: will season five be as good as the ones that came before? On the evidence of this opener, yes indeed, so much so that American critics have been hailing it as the best ever,Change is in the air at Chicago's upmarket law firm Lockhart Gardner. Not only does Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) have to be mindful of her new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Most of us like a good legal drama, which is why there have been so many of them. By the same logic, finding a fresh spin or a new way of writing and shooting them inevitably grows ever-tougher.The Escape Artist, a new three-parter written by Spooks veteran David Wolstencroft, has given itself a head start by casting David "Mr Box Office" Tennant in the lead role of the irritatingly clever and successful barrister Will Burton. He has all the usual perquisites that accompany this familiar TV archetype - sparky and adoring wife, photogenic offspring, penthouse apartment with spectacular views Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We have plenty to be paranoid about in the most surveilled country in the world. British contributions to the conspiracy thrillers that bloomed so fruitfully in the US around Watergate have, though, stayed slim. Maybe that’s one reason Closed Circuit’s extreme Secret Service behaviour in the aftermath of a bomb atrocity at London’s Borough market feels so fake.CIA agents snuffing out inconvenient people on city streets is cinematic second nature. MI5 hunting Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall’s high-powered barristers through Dalston back-alleys takes more swallowing. So does some of the dialogue in Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Terence Rattigan's beautifully spoken characters are a passionate lot in this gripping story of a father's fight to prove his son's innocence. Lindsay Posner's production of the 1946 play succors and seduces its audience with an unstoppable determination to prove that right will be done. Its methods may not be subtle, but its effects are no less stirring.How often the audience is reminded that a boy stealing a five-shilling postal order is such “a little case”: no matter for the Government, nor the media nor a family to fret over. And yet, how evident it becomes that the principles at stake Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
My only real complaint about the ever-excellent Good Wife is that they cram so much into every episode that it's notoriously difficult to keep track of all the plots, subplots, new names and cunningly tangled relationships. It's a bit like a televisual zip file, where you have to unpack it before you can extract all the contents.Anyhow, after some diligent pausing and rewinding, I can confidently declare that this first episode of series four was a sizzler, picking up where series three left off with no pause for breath. Screenwriters Robert King and Michelle King had reprised one of their Read more ...