thrillers
Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feelingSunday, 03 March 2019
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill the Truth review - taut thriller of big ideasSunday, 24 February 2019
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam... Read more... |
DVD: The GuiltyFriday, 22 February 2019
It’s another night in an emergency services dispatch room in Copenhagen. Policeman Asger Holm has been taken off active patrol pending a conduct investigation and is stuck on the phones. Drunks, druggies, posh blokes complaining of being mugged in... Read more... |
Tana French: The Wych Elm review - a lucky man and his downfallSunday, 17 February 2019
A Tana French crime novel is never just a thriller. Probably more acclaimed in the USA than the UK (she gets rave reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times) French always transcends the genre, stylistically, emotionally, atmospherically.Her... Read more... |
Anthropocene, Hackney Empire review - vivid soundscapes but not quite enough thrillsFriday, 08 February 2019
The flayed corpse of a dead seal hangs red and grotesque at the back of the stage. It’s a placeholder; we know that by the end of Anthropocene – Scottish composer Stuart McRae’s latest collaboration with librettist Louise Welsh – something more... Read more... |
Burning review - an explosive psychological thrillerSaturday, 02 February 2019
Burning, which is the first film directed by the Korean master Lee Chang-dong since 2010’s Poetry, begins as the desultory story of a hook-up between a pair of poor, unmotivated millennials – the girl already a lost soul, the boy a wannabe writer... Read more... |
Destroyer review - Kidman shines in middling crime dramaSaturday, 26 January 2019
Destroyer. It’s an apt name. Like the film, it's grandiose and blunt. Nicole Kidman is almost unrecognisable (a requirement when aiming for nominations) as Detective Erin Bell, a damaged survivor of an undercover heist gone wrong. When her target... Read more... |
The Tell-Tale Heart, National Theatre review - bloody good fun as well as bloodyMonday, 17 December 2018
The Tell-Tale Heart may be the title of an 1843 short story by Edgar Allen Poe, but rest assured that Anthony Neilson's adaptation of it for the National contains this theatre maverick's signature throughout. To be sure, the play charts a Poe-esque... Read more... |
Boris Akunin: Black City review - a novel to sharpen the witsSunday, 16 December 2018
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin, the protagonist of Boris Akunin’s series of historical thrillers, is an elegant, eccentric sometime government servant, spy and diplomat, as... Read more... |
The Little Drummer Girl, BBC One, series finale review - Le Carré drama comes to the boil at lastMonday, 03 December 2018
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a... Read more... |
Three Identical Strangers review - an extraordinary true storyThursday, 29 November 2018
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play... Read more... |
The Girl in the Spider's Web review - Claire Foy leathers upThursday, 22 November 2018
The enthronement of Claire Foy has been quite a spectacle. Perhaps some of Her Majesty’s mystique has rubbed off, as she is now entering that territory known to few young actors, where you’ll happily pay to see her in anything. Should that policy... Read more... |
