crime
Presumed Innocent, Apple TV+ review - you read the book and saw the movie...Monday, 17 June 2024
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the... Read more... |
The Moor review - Yorkshire chiller is ambitious but muddledSaturday, 15 June 2024
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan... Read more... |
Tokyo Vice, Series 2, BBC iPlayer review - an exciting ride that stretches credibilityThursday, 30 May 2024
It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert... Read more... |
Rebus, BBC One review - revival of Ian Rankin's Scottish 'tec hits the jackpotMonday, 20 May 2024
The previous incarnation of Ian Rankin’s Scottish detective on ITV starred, in their contrasting styles, John Hannah and Ken Stott. For this Rebus redux, arriving nearly 25 years after the original first series began, screenwriter Gregory Burke has... Read more... |
Prisoner, BBC Four review - jailhouse rocked by drugs, violence and racismThursday, 07 March 2024
The notion of prison as a pressure cooker of human behaviour and emotions is hardly a new one, but it can provide formidable fuel for drama. It does so here in this ferociously gripping Danish series, which hails from the same production company as... Read more... |
The Traitors, Series 2, BBC One review - back to the mind-labyrinthSaturday, 27 January 2024
Asking whether there could be an end to melody given only 12 notes to work with, Sergey Prokofiev compared the possibilities to a chess game: “for the fourth move of the White there will be about 60 million variants.”So it is with the basic formula... Read more... |
The Good John Proctor, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Salem-set drama loses some of its power in LondonSaturday, 13 January 2024
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it... Read more... |
The Tourist, Series 2, BBC One review - an amnesiac Jamie Dornan explores his Irish rootsWednesday, 03 January 2024
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the... Read more... |
Murder Is Easy, BBC One review - was this journey really necessary?Thursday, 28 December 2023
Well at least they haven’t changed the identity of the killer this time around, but the BBC’s new version of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel has been modified in other ways. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meenu Gaur have opted to move... Read more... |
Blood Coast, Netflix review - mayhem in MarseilleSaturday, 16 December 2023
The original title of this French crime drama was Pax Massilia, a reference to the classical roots of its setting in what is now known as Marseille. Dating back to the 6th Century BC, it’s supposedly the oldest city in France. An atmospheric mix of... Read more... |
Kin, BBC One review - in Dublin's not-so-fair cityTuesday, 05 December 2023
Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture... Read more... |
Boat Story, BBC One review - once upon a time in YorkshireTuesday, 28 November 2023
It was as long ago as January last year that the prolific Williams brothers, Jack and Harry, delivered their absorbing Australian Outback thriller The Tourist. Hitherto, product seemed to have been pouring out of them almost hourly, whether it was... Read more... |
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