crime
Matt Wolf
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Shamefully overlooked in this year's Oscar line-up, which neglected the film altogether, this portrait of crime and punishment during New York City's own lawless nadir some 30-odd years ago feels both like the finest film that the late Sidney Lumet never made and also entirely fresh in its portrait of morality trying to keep its head above the murk. And Chandor's cast match him every step of the way, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain giving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a poignant moment for the return of this superior French police drama. With the Paris terrorist crisis the top story across all media, we rejoin our fictional police captain Laure Berthaud to find her still in emotional fragments following the death of her lover Sami in a terrorist bomb blast at the end of series four. It's to the show's credit that its unvarnished portrait of policing and the compromises and political chicanery that surround it doesn't pale in the glare of real-life events.However, terrorism isn't at the centre of this fifth series. Instead, the dishevelled Berthaud ( Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Before the second series of The Fall began, I was watching Gillian Anderson being interviewed on This Morning. While the subject matter of the drama - a tense game of cat and mouse between Anderson’s DSI Stella Gibson and Jamie Dornan’s perverted serial killer - was never going to translate well to daytime telly, but I was still a little taken aback by Amanda Holden’s fawning over the apparent sexiness of Dornan’s character. In this feature-length finale, new detective on the block Tom Anderson (Colin Morgan) also attempted to pursue the idea that there was something alluring about the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So now we know. Sort of. The missing clue was tweezered into view in time for the final episode of The Missing and the fate of little Olly Hughes has been revealed. Up to a point. To those reading this without having seen the dénouement, it gives only a little away to report that the plot involving the search for a ring of paedophiles has been a gigantic red herring. Probably.The Missing hasn’t been quite the water cooler event to match Broadchurch. But with skilful feints and shimmies it has kept any number of options open – and continues to do so – while simultaneously confirming one's Read more ...
David Nice
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?Alexander Mørk-Eidem took the question as the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This will have brought a nostalgic tear to the eye of fans of The Sweeney (the TV show, not the Ray Winstone movie) or GF Newman's still-shocking 1978 series Law and Order. The producers had rounded up seven retired policepersons and got them to spill some of the beans about what policing was like in the Sixties and Seventies.The strange thing was, it was exactly like folklore says it used to be. There was plenty of rough justice including kickings and beatings, dousings in freezing cold baths and possibly even some electric shocks. Rule-bending was de rigueur, there was routine acceptance by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Your law is too soft. Make it more strict.” An Albanian illegal immigrant suspected of handling stolen goods was unimpressed by the courtesy extended to him by Bedfordshire Police. Too many pleases and thank yous, he complained. In Tirana the rozzers probably don’t ask you if you have any food allergies.The thin blue line has launched Operation Charm Offensive. In September Channel 4 broadcast Cops and Robbers about how police in the West Midlands deal with serial petty offenders, and they came over as secular saints. Next year there’s a big BBC One series inside the Met, who are presumably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Given the long shadow cast by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, it’s sort of surprising that no drama department has commissioned something like The Missing before. It’s not the same story of course. The child alluded to in the title is a five-year-old boy, not a three-year-old girl, and he’s abducted in France rather than Portugal. But it’s impossible not to be aware of the story’s factual parallel. And the parental trauma as the awful truth dawns is, one can only imagine, exactly the same.The difference is that The Missing is shaping up to be a thriller. A thriller by its very nature Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale and (coming soon) Ben Affleck have all had a go at playing the fully-formed Caped Crusader, though for some Adam West's ludicrously campy Sixties incarnation remains the score to beat. But apparently that's still not enough. Hitched firmly to the ongoing craze for exploiting any nook and cranny of superhero folklore, Gotham whizzes us back to the story's embryonic days, when 12-year-old Bruce Wayne has lost his parents in a seemingly random double murder and has yet to emerge in his full Dark Knight regalia.The challenge here was to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack Thorne's new eight-part drama is set in a fictional but recognisable small English village, Overton, where life is centred on farming and racehorses. A green and pleasant land? Not so much; this is a series with a group of pill-popping, shagging teenagers at its heart – well, it is from the man who wrote Skins.In the opener, we meet the group of friends as they play a game of chicken, jumping into a huge grain silo. It's reckless, but it's fun, as is drinking all night then stealing a car and driving like a maniac through the narrow country lanes. And when it all goes wrong and one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of this dense and rewarding odyssey of Prohibition and American gangsterism are doubtless still reeling from the news that its fifth series will be the last, despite the riotous applause which greeted series four. This unwelcome state of affairs perhaps accounted for the vaguely dissociated and dream-like quality of this season opener, which was as much concerned with filling in some of Nucky Thompson's early history as with driving the plot forward into the 1930s.An opening sequence set in 1884, of young boys diving into the sea to catch gold coins flung from the Atlantic City pier by Read more ...