crime
emma.simmonds
Set in the near future on the outskirts of New York, Robot & Frank sees a grizzled ex-con warm to his mechanical helper, eventually enlisting him as a criminal accomplice. It might sound like the plot of a genre flick (Short Circuit springs to mind) but, like the robot in question, this little movie will knock you sideways with its soul. Boasting beautiful performances and ample humour, director Jake Schreier’s accomplished feature debut considers the preciousness and precariousness of memories – how they make us who we are, and indeed what it means to be alive.Frank Langella plays our 70 Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rian Johnson’s spunky debut Brick (2005) fused the past with the present, the old with the young, as high-school kids inhabited the archetypal characters and played out scenarios from 1940s noir. It worked beautifully. His third film Looper - whilst sharing Brick’s love of posturing dialogue and shadowy villainy - looks forward and then forward again and finds that the future is far from bright. If Brick was conceptually ambitious yet small-scale, Looper gives us filmic chutzpah with the budget (and stars) to match.It’s set predominantly in a dystopian 2044, in and around Kansas City, with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite Lilyhammer’s sub-zero, snow white Norwegian setting, it is initially difficult to divorce Frank Tagliano from The Sopranos’ Silvio Dante. They’re both played by Steven Van Zandt and both are Mafia men. The suit they wear is the same. Yet Lilyhammer is not The Sopranos in Norway and, by plonking this stereotype into the most unlikely of locations, Van Zandt reveals a flair for nuance formerly obscured by the shadows of others.In The Sopranos, as in the E Street Band, he cemented his image as a side man. Being Bruce Springsteen’s long-term guitarist is probably enough to secure Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
We have been here before: The Killing wasn’t the first crime drama to open with a damsel in distress. This time it’s a schoolgirl who is being chased across the sand dunes at night. She has been stabbed. She falls – conveniently backwards – to the ground. The pursuer is reflected in the dying pupil’s dilated pupil. “I’m sorry,” whispers the girl. Why?The first part of A Mother's Son throws up many more intriguing questions. The second one is why the script editor allowed Chris Lang to repeatedly commit the cardinal sin of letting his characters tell each other what they already know. “My Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A sense of déjà vu strikes from the very first shot. It is a dark and stormy night. A lone man staggers down an empty street through the lashing rain. Once indoors we see he has blood on his hands. A minute has not yet passed but Warren Brown – for it is he – tears his shirt off. Before we can admire the size of the former cage fighter’s guns he produces a real one. Roll titles.They identify the man as a Good Cop. John Paul – never just John – Rocksavage is a clumsy name for a leading character. His creator, Stephen Butchard, wants us to know that the politically correct PC is Catholic, Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Jimmy McGovern’s one-man mission to boost the quota of Scousers seen on the small screen continues in “Stephen’s Story” – the latest bout of button-pushing misery otherwise known as Accused. Seventeen-year-old Stephen Cartwright’s beloved Irish mother is bedridden but this doesn’t stop him table-ending his girlfriend. McGovern and co-writer Danny Brocklehurst thus immediately raise the twin pillars of drama: death and sex.They are embodied – literally – in the pneumatic figure of Charlotte, a palliative care nurse who eases Mrs Cartwright’s passing with morphine and then – with shocking speed Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
If you hate zombies and East End gangster movies, Cockneys vs Zombies will wreck those prejudices. Expect to have them turned topsy-turvy by this pocket-sized dynamo of horror comedy. Visually, it gets the simple things right straightaway. The blood looks real(ish). The London locations are cheerily drearily evocative. Then there's the unique opportunity of seeing Goldfinger Bond Girl and all-around heroine Honor Blackman fire a machine gun. Certainly as good as if not better than Shaun of the Dead, there is no doubt that Cockneys vs Zombies will be, in some Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I have done stuff,” says Stefan. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve done this." He has been arrested driving the car of a woman killed a short time earlier. Although an instant suspect, it’s soon clear his story and that of the victim’s sister don’t tally. Murder wasn’t a whodunit or a procedural, but a point-of-view rundown of the aftermath of murder. It was also grim, unflinching and memorable.Directed by Denmark’s Birger Larsen, who was behind a few episodes each of The Killing’s first series and Those Who Kill, the Nottingham-set Murder had familiar Danish touches: a story seen from the Read more ...
Stephen Butchard
On Thursday the BBC will screen the opening episode of the television drama Good Cop. I finished writing it back in August 2010, and on the strength of that story and ideas for a total of four episodes, the series was green-lit in February 2011. We completed filming (pictured below) by the end of December 2011, then came post-production. Now at last we have our transmission date and it will be broadcast to the world.Those who watch will see a series of pictures, naturally, perhaps not realising that each of them began life as words on a page - not that it’s important that they make the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Aside from the platinum hair and the porcelain beauty, there is no identikit Hitchcock blonde. She can be an ice-hearted femme fatale or a traumatised hysteric, or she can be Grace Kelly, a peachy embodiment of femininity whom the director enjoyed throwing in harm’s way. He would memorably do it in Rear Window, a film which he talked about to his leading lady throughout the making of Dial M for Murder.Hitchcock first saw Kelly in the same 1950 screen test which persuaded Fred Zinnemann to cast her in High Noon (1952). Whatever he saw, he deemed her ideal for Dial M for Murder (1954), a film Read more ...