crime
Jasper Rees
A mouldered corpse, forgotten for years in a tottering Victorian house that teems with secrets? What Remains was only ever heading in one direction. Gothic from the off, episode by episode it got gothicker and gothicker. By the climax there was a messy Jenga of bodies, which was perhaps not unexpected, but did anyone guess quite how many characters would end up with blood on their hands? Not ex-detective Len Harper, who was no closer to solving the case when he took the law into his.Tony Basgallop’s script, abetted by director Coky Giedroyc’s eager eye for a creepy cranny, has pushed the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Much hype has been whipped up around this tale of a gang of thuggish, racketeering bookies in Birmingham just after World War One. It's a pretty good cast, with Helen McCrory's Aunt Polly laying down the law within the criminal Shelby family, Cillian Murphy playing her ambitious nephew Tommy and Sam Neill as sinister Belfast copper Inspector Campbell. But this opener still felt a little wobbly on its feet.A lot of it was down to the accents, which can be slippery little devils to get right (we know how easily attempts at Welsh can end up detouring to Mumbai). Since this is Birmingham, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ronan Bennett doesn’t do protracted. The writer of Top Boy has whipped us through another series, in the course of which an awful lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. Except that it’s blood rather than water that tends to flow in Summerhouse, and the first we saw of a bridge in that neck of East London was in the last seconds of episode four, with Dushane hiding underneath one. He looked more than a bit cornered – not how we’re used to seeing him.Ashley Walters has grown Dushane (main picture) into a character whose confidence knows few bounds. He’s even arbitrated a feud Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Scientists may have found a cure for insomnia. It’s thinking up names for television detectives. Have you noticed how elephant-tranquilisingly dull they are? Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller. Len Harper. Denise Woods. Tony Gates, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming. Sergeant Geoff Plank. DS Fiona Photofit. Oh go on then, couple of ringers in there, but the rest have lately been busting crime on a mainstream channel near you (see sidebar to ID them all).Apparently they end up with these vapid non-names because the plausible ones are all taken by real coppers already. The TV companies are not allowed to Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper. When Rupert Penry-Jones, dressed in suave black tie like the James Bond he never was, arrived at the book launch that kicked off this fourth series of Whitechapel, it took a few minutes - and a bit of stylised violence in an alley involving a kid in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s a while since BBC One served us up for Sunday night primetime something with so much black humour as there is to enjoy in What Remains. The tone of the script from Tony Basgallop (Inside Men) is as sardonic as it comes, and the cast of characters he assembles around its south London location doesn’t look like it will be presenting the human race in its most redeeming light.David Threlfall as DI Len Harper isn't a detective with many illusions left about his job, or the people it brings him into contact with – we can see it in those tired eyes and stubbled cheeks. It’s Threfall’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the almost complete absence of the police from the first series of Top Boy, the sirens are blazing as the follow-on to Ronan Bennett’s tough drug-dealing drama kicks in. Specifically, they’re exhuming the corpse of Kamale, who fell victim to Dushane’s ascendance to the position of Top Boy in the East London estate of Summerhouse. What’s left of Kamale a year on is no pretty sight, even though the scene’s got some spectacular background illumination from the O2 stadium.The main change in the ‘hood is that Dushane (Ashley Walters) has parted company with his former best mate Sully (Kane Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Originally there was never any plan to take Top Boy into a second series, but its arrival in autumn 2011 provoked such acclaim and enthusiasm (mixed with a bit of useful controversy) that Channel 4 could hardly help themselves from recommissioning it. It has partly been a phenomenon driven by social media, where fans have persistently discussed the show and demanded another series over the intervening two years.The upshot was that writer and Hackney resident Ronan Bennett went back to his research and his word processor, and next week we'll see what happens next to Sully (Kane Robinson) and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are not generally a lot of laughs in dead bodies. So Raymond Chandler saw the funny side of murder, and Carl Hiassen dresses felonies in a bright Hawaiian shirt. But Glasgow, you’d think, would tend to keep corpses and comedy in separate boxes. Not here. Denise Mina’s fiction can keep a straight face when it needs to. Her trilogy of novels set in a hard-boiled Glasgow news room in the early 1980s takes a head-on look at the worst in humanity. But as adapted for BBC One, they’re also a hoot.The Field of Blood made a bit of a splash when it was adapted in 2011. Its sequel has now been Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
Moving the action to an exotic location is usually a sign of desperation when a character-based drama is flagging on home turf. New Tricks, most at ease in Soho and Stepney, hobbled into its tenth series with a two-parter set in Gibraltar – which is what passes for an exotic location in a show whose idea of the big chase is a sprint through the botanical gardens.Alun Armstrong, supremely glum (as well he might be, for he has seen the script) and grounded by his boss, DS Sandra Pullman (Amanda Redman, pictured below) and the high-ups, slipped the leash to join his ageing cops from the Met’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Introducing his latest film at a preview screening, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn commented, "If Drive was like taking really good cocaine, Only God Forgives is like taking really good acid." It's an appropriate (and characteristically provocative) comparison - and if Only God Forgives is not quite the trip one might hope for, it's certainly hypnotising and alarming. That Winding Refn's ninth film is dedicated to the Chilean surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (best known for El Topo and Santa Sangre and a mentor to Winding Refn) gives you an idea of the kind of Read more ...