crime
Mark Sanderson
“This is a true story. This is a story…” The self-referential nature of Noah Hawley’s baroque narrative arc was one of the great joys of the third season of Fargo. Over the past 10 weeks its constant invention, cinematic tricks and award-worthy performances have come together to produce the best drama of the year (so far).The story it tells is an old one: Cain slays Abel. Or rather Emmit kills Ray (Ewan McGregor in both roles). As someone who shall be nameless sang a long time ago: “Two little boys had two little toys”. In this case a stamp collection and a cherry-red Corvette. The Stussy Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the riveting first series of Top of the Lake, it was personal for Down Under detective Robin Griffin. She headed to a hilly corner of New Zealand to be around for the death of her mother while looking into the disappearance of a young girl. There she fell in love with the estranged son of a local villain but had to pull out upon learning that he was in fact her half-brother. A last-minute denial of paternity by the villain left her with something to smile about, especially as she also exposed a paedophile ring and shot its facilitator.Spool forward to the second series on BBC Two, and the Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Detective Inspector Helen Weeks (MyAnna Buring), having finally cornered a skanky drug-dealer/benefit cheat in a blind alley – and stopped an eager PC from Tasering the woman – is punched in the stomach for her pains. How’s that for a hard-hitting start? Weeks is pregnant – she should be called Eleven Weeks – and it later transpires she’s not sure who’s the daddy.In the Dark, based on the novel by Mark Billingham, may seem like a run-of-the-mill crime drama but soon modulates into something deeper. The pre-title sequence shows someone digging a grave on a dark and stormy night. The identity Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir starring Sean Bean and Sting, aided and abetted by, er, Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones. Fear not – this was Mike Figgis’s feature debut, and it’s a remarkable piece of work, Figgis also responsible for the screenplay and soundtrack. The plot is disarmingly straightforward; Sting’s jazz club is threatened by dodgy developers, and the young Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Appreciating art involves applauding experimentation, but when you break new ground you don’t always land on your feet. Case in point: Get Even, a game that tells an old story in a new way, and at times, pays a high price for attempting innovation.You assume the role of Cole Black, an apt name for a hired gun with a gruff Sean Bean-style northern accent, who regains consciousness in a deserted asylum with almost no recollection of his past, apart from the lasting memory of a young girl, held hostage, who had a bad encounter with a bomb vest. Under the guidance of an anonymous captor, Black Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Baby drives like a deranged bullet. Edgar Wright’s “diegetic action-musical” choreographs the bank-heist getaways of angel-faced Baby (Ansel Elgort) as physically exhilarating pure cinema, a rush that’s rare. It’s also pure, adrenalin-pumping rock’n’roll, a combination built into the plot: Baby can only drive so long as his tinnitus-drowning cassette mix-tapes play, giving him the rhythm and focus he needs. Doc (a lugubrious Kevin Spacey) is the boss he owes, who keeps his pedal reluctantly to the metal, never quite reaching the promised last job, and forced to work with increasingly violent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Heaven alone knows we've pressing anxieties enough to preoccupy us, but if you have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate more, the iPlayer can oblige. Available now on BBC Three is the latest in what now becomes a trilogy of heartrending dramas with Murdered in the title. Murdered by My Boyfriend and Murdered by My Father, both of which won Baftas for actors in leading roles, is now followed by Murdered For Being Different.As expected of this immensely impressive strand, it doesn't get any less unbearable to watch an innocent young woman fall victim to inexplicable violence. And yet this Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episode, Riviera is a funny place for shitty people.The first few minutes flung us between London, Monaco and New York. Bright lights, big titties. The connection between money and sex was made straight away – and in the case of Christos Clios (Dimitri Leonidas, pictured below) in doggy style. Talking about money in Canary Wharf – “there is nothing more rigorous” – turns him on. According to him, the unregulated international art Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison. It relocates the Agatha Christie-style country house mystery to a Breton chateau, where a complicated inheritance causes the corrupt de Kerloguen family to revert to murderous type. Its flightiness is tethered by Franju’s elegance and wit, and his mostly young cast’s charm.This could easily be Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Was it just a coincidence that budding serial killer Sam attended Ripley Heath High? Probably not. Born to Kill, written by Tracey Malone and Kate Ashfield, was keenly aware that it followed in the bloody footsteps of both real sociopaths such as Harold Shipman and fictional ones such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. And what a dance it led us!Over the past four weeks on Channel 4 we have seen the schoolboy move from the edge of things – a diving board, a wooded hollow where he hid his trophy tin, a birthday party for his only friend’s father – to the centre of a full-blown psychotic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cop a load of that, then. Hana Reznikova is serving time for triple murder. Ted Hastings is on permanent gardening leave. The Huntleys have renewed their wedding vows on a family trip to Disneyworld. Just kidding. This is a Reg 15 alert to advise you that the following paragraphs contain almost nothing but spoilers.So what happened in the dense, pulsating finale to series four of Line of Duty, its first on BBC One? “It’s complicated,” DCI Roz Huntley told her grouchy kids. It certainly was. Ever since her eyes pinged open at the end of episode one, we’ve been waiting for Huntley to navigate a Read more ...