crime
Kieron Tyler
The bad taste left by The Black Panther lingers like a mouthful of cinders long after it’s been expelled from the DVD player. This latest entry in the BFI's Flipside series of rescued British film obscurities is the shocking adaptation of the story of British murderer and psychopath Donald Neilson, dubbed The Black Panther by the Seventies’ press. The film arrived in cinemas in 1978 within months of Neilson's conviction and was swiftly banned by local authorities concerned it was a gratuitous cash-in.It opens with Neilson preparing for crime. Ex-army, with a head full of the sound of marching Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It ended where it began, between Copenhagen and Malmö along the Öresund bridge. The journey back to square one took in issues of homelessness, mental health, immigration and child labour. Drug abuse, national identity, family break-up and the power of the media cropped up too. But none of these are what The Bridge hinged on. Without its main characters and measured pace, The Bridge could have been little more than a bleak trudge through society’s ills.The final episode was typically understated, revealing its layers and horrors gradually. Martin Rohde’s (Kim Bodnia) son had been abducted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first series of the French cops gone-to-pot drama ended with Lieutenant Eddy Caplan about to blow the head off his nemesis Serge Lemoine. Offing him was supposed to solve all Caplan and his team’s problems. Unfortunately, Lemoine was fitted with a wire and things didn’t go to plan. Series two began in the immediate aftermath with Caplan, his in do-do colleagues and Lemoine caged in the back of police van. As it rattled along, their on-the-run compadre Théo Vachewski was being hunted down.After a brief recap of the previous series, the episode was off and running. Braquo's Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Explaining the difference between the first series of the uncompromising French policier Braquo and the second, which he has come on board to write, Abdel Raouf Dafri says his take is “even more violent, even more sarcastic. The line between the good guys and the bad guys is even more fluid”. Dafri knows about bad guys. He wrote Mesrine and A Prophet. He also knows series one of Braquo is a tough act to follow.With series two premiering on British TV this Sunday, Braquo joins Saturday night’s The Bridge to fill out the weekend’s foreign-language crime TV schedule. The pacing, shocks and tonal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly difficult for a detective to create any sort of elbow room on the small flat screen in the corner. Up in Denmark they’ve been taking the extreme route, where the dour, bejumpered Sara Lund of The Killing looks like a Butlins entertainer next to Sofia Helin’s hatchet-faced autistic sleuth Saga Noren in The Bridge. In Blighty we churn out far more of these things than the Danes, but not much seems to have moved on much since Inspector Morse started feeling queasy around corpses and necking real ale two decades back. We still get our crimebusters from a strictly limited Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Does he know she's a bit odd?" asks one of Saga Noren's Swedish police colleagues, on hearing that Danish copper Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) is working with Noren on a new murder case. Well, he's begininning to get the idea. He's seen her forbid an ambulance to cross her crime scene perimeter, even though it was carrying a new heart for a critically ill patient. She drags Rohde out of bed in the middle of the night to track down a piece of evidence, then when he delivers it to her at police HQ she barely says thanks and shuts the door in his face. Apparently she never eats meals.With her long Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up. There was the unspeakable package shoved through the letterbox shortly after he complained to the girl’s school and got her suspended. And there was the lucrative deal with developers that Ted may or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Bunting is currently serving 11 life sentences. He was Australia’s serial killer. A murderous manipulator masquerading as a vigilante, he brought young people, their family members and a disenfranchised suburban community into his madness. Snowtown dramatises these deeply distressing events.Produced by Warp Films - also behind the challenging Tyrannosaur - Snowtown slots into a lineage with the fictive Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the fact-based Bundy. Like Ted Bundy, Bunting was a charmer. He wheedled his way into a fractured household on the edges of Adelaide Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Olympics will be upon us all any minute now, but for the residents of East London they have been physically sprouting at the end of the road in the shape of a futuristic stadium for years. It takes the role of a shy walk-on in Wild Bill, a looming symbol of a local regeneration which was touted as integral to the hosting bid. It’s safe to say that the London seen here will not earn the grateful rubberstamp of the Cultural Olympiad. If you could get onto a podium for knifing, gashing, stabbing, thumping and thrashing, the characters we meet here could have been contenders. They’d probably Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Despite an unfortunate title which seemed to have fallen from the pages of the latest Cosmo sex survey (“add some spice to the bedroom: try reverse missionary”), the first instalment of this three-part series about faith, community and religious history had honourable intentions. Its starting premise was that Britain is not just broken but “saturated in secularism”, and throughout it acted as though both presumptions were not only a) true and b) indisputably Bad Things, but also that one was directly responsible for the other.On paper the idea had a neat symmetry. A religious leader from a Read more ...