crime
Nick Hasted
“They say we all have a beast locked up inside of us,” a character observes early in this Korean crime movie. Monsters are certainly chewing at the moral fibre of police captains Jung (Lee Sung-min) and Han (Yoo Jae-myung) as they corruptly pursue promotion. The serial killer they race to capture, like the schoolgirl he’s torn to pieces, become incidental to ambition, and the tendrils of vengeance which turn jungle-thick in its wake.Jung-ho Lee’s remake of the French thriller 36th Precinct, which starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil as romantic as well as career rivals, throws elements Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While not the most headline-catching show on Netflix, Ozark has been steadily accruing critical accolades (including a couple of Emmys) and a devoted audience. Perhaps this superb third series will mark the tipping point where Ozark crosses over from cliqueishness to mass adulation.It all began back with the first season in 2017, when Marty Byrde’s Chicago-based financial services company fell foul of their client, a Mexican drug cartel. Marty’s partner made the insane blunder of skimming off $8m of the cartel’s funds, which their company were supposed to be laundering. Long story short, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Liar, one of many thrillers from the fertile keyboards of Jack and Harry Williams, was on ITV back in 2017, so you may have forgotten the somewhat labyrinthine details. In a nutshell, smarmy surgeon and serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) had been unmasked by the dogged (and sometimes illegal) methods of one of his 19 victims, schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). However, before the police could arrest him, his dead body was found in the marshes on the Kent coast, with its throat cut. End of series one.An early revelation in this new season was that DI Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With prison overcrowding reaching chronic proportions, police in County Durham have developed the Checkpoint programme to try to keep offenders out of jail with rehabilitation in the community. It’s like Felons Anonymous – candidates have to sign a contract confessing their crimes and stipulating that they won’t reoffend. They get one chance, and if they break the pledge they’ll end up behind bars.Some find it easier than others to kick their criminal habits, but according to statistics we were shown, prisoners released from jail were more than twice as likely to reoffend as Checkpoint “ Read more ...
Owen Richards
He's one of Japan's foremost directors, and if you’ve witnessed one of his films before, you know what to expect from a Takashi Miike yakuza film. High-octane, boundary pushing fun from first frame to last. And that’s exactly what First Love is.The plot is simultaneously complicated and simple. The ambitious but hapless Kase plans on stealing drugs from his own yakuza boss and blame it on the triads. This involves his cop accomplice killing Monica, an escort prone to hallucinations. But when a young boxer, Leo, steps in to save Monica, the whole plan starts to fall apart.What follows is an Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a palpable rage to Melina Matsoukas’ first feature film Queen & Slim, starring Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya and newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith. Cast in the mould of Bonnie and Clyde, it’s a film that has you clinging to the arms of your seat from the first fifteen-minutes. In the opening scene, we learn that Turner-Smith’s character - called Queen for the majority of the film - is a defence lawyer who has recently lost her client to the death penalty. She’s on a Tinder date with Slim (Kaluuya), to distract herself. On the way home in Slim’s car they get pulled over by a trigger Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An idyllic Scottish classroom full of happy children making sponge paintings of flowers with two enthusiastic young teachers – clearly, doom is in the air. Here comes that sense of dread again a little later at a ceilidh in a village hall, with everyone trying a little too hard to look happy. And it’s soon confirmed in a flash-forward to a pathologist wiping down an autopsy table.The first of the four episodes of C4's Deadwater Fell, written and created by Daisy Coulam (Humans, Grantchester) and directed by Lynsey Miller, is gripping and disturbing, with a strong cast, though some of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's the smallest lies that can bring you down. When he is asked by a detective how he got on with his family, who have just been murdered in a mass shooting at their Essex farm, Jeremy Bamber (Freddie Fox) says: “Really well. We were friends.” A quizzical look briefly scutters across the face of his cousin Ann Eaton (Gemma Whelan) who overhears. As this six-part series unfolds, we will see that it was pointless mistruths like that that would help bring about Bamber's eventual undoing.It was one of many subtle moments of doubt dropped into ITV's White House Farm, which tells the story of how Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Guy Ritchie enjoyed his greatest commercial success with 2019’s live-action fantasy Aladdin, the most atypical project of his career, but The Gentlemen finds him back on his best-known turf as a purveyor of mouthy, ultra-violent geezerism. It’s 21 years since his debut hit with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but its shaggy-dog story-telling and spirit of high-wire anarchy resurface intact.In time-honoured fashion, Ritchie has assembled a cast which looks a bit weird on paper but pays handsome dividends. Matthew McConaughey’s arrival in Ritchie-land is announced by him striding into the Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence. Director Zackary Adler perhaps aimed for contrast, maybe even balance, with this ill foray into the hit job thriller, but he’s ended up with confusion and lifelessness.Sinister veteran killer Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman) faces trial and has planned to kill the only living witness to his crimes before the testimony is given. A motorbiked hitwoman, aka “the courier Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago. His film (as producer, writer, director and star) is an obvious labour of love, an evocative, entertaining, old-fashioned gumshoe noir, which fits snugly within the traditions of the genre while offering a refreshingly atypical hero.Forget Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes – sharply tailored, fast-talking, ineffably cool. Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a fledgling private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, who can’t help but fire off spontaneous Read more ...
Graham Fuller
“Badass” – as applied to dynamic women – and “girl power” may be the kinds of exhausted clichés that are reductive in the #MeToo and Time’s Up era, but the new Charlie’s Angels movie revitalises the attitude they describe in a way that’s neither condescending nor retrogressive. Hunger Games actor Elizabeth Banks’s second feature as a director, and the first she’s written, is a pleasurably larky action rollercoaster that makes the most of its lowballed feminism. The three crime-busting warriors this time work for the European branch of the LA-based Charles Townsend Detective Agency. Read more ...