crime
Adam Sweeting
Throughout its preceding five episodes, The Undoing (Sky Atlantic) has skilfully, if a little shamelessly, kept the fickle finger of suspicion in perpetual motion. Though Hugh Grant’s oily, untrustworthy oncologist Jonathan Fraser has been smack in the centre of the frame for the horrific murder of Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), perhaps that only meant that creator David E Kelly had been laying the groundwork for a spectacular reveal somewhere in this final hour.The end of episode five had been startling enough, as Grace Fraser (Nicole Kidman) discovered the murder weapon (unless we were Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. This film adaptation of What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe’s 1994 bestselling novel, is a postmodern crime story — and then some. And then some more. And yet more of more. To say that it’s complicated is probably an understatement (it really is!), but it also has more than a few pleasurable elements, notably the cast: although we only hear their voices, director Tamara Harvey has persuaded Derek Jacobi, Stephen Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and what we do with our lives. But we can make no excuses with Time, a documentary about a woman so remarkable that it could only be true.In 1997, married couple Fox and Rob Rich had a family and a failing business. In desperation, they attempted armed robbery of a bank. Fox was incarcerated for three and a half years, and her husband was sentenced to Read more ...
Olivia Fletcher
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises performed by Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015 and then set aside to marinade in a desk drawer while the world fell apart. Moshfegh’s characters “zoom” and gallop, they feel “glued down” and lost: a neat array of overactive but introverted low-lives, possessed by a miscellany of sordid desires. Moshfegh’s attraction to creating obsessive personalities breeds a type of paranoia in her readers, who may very well remain unsure about whether her narrators speak in earnest or in jest. Death in Her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
September 18th is the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, an appropriate moment to release Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary exploring the vexed question: was it murder, suicide or a tragic accident? Trying to unravel this conundrum, director Tim Conrad sifts through the evidence, speculates about the crucial unknowns and, rather unconvincingly, creates possible end game scenarios. But groping around in such murky waters only stirs up a lot of mud and the death of the world’s greatest guitarist remains stubbornly obscure.The post-mortem found that Hendrix drowned in his own vomit Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Not to be confused with Savages, the Oliver Stone film of 2012 about marijuana smuggling, Savage is a story of New Zealand street gangs: how to join and how to escape, which, when you’ve got the words Savages and Poneke (the Maori name for Wellington, where the film is set) tattooed on your face, like Danny, aka Damage (Jake Ryan), is not going to be easy.There’s a lot of standing around in the dark beside fires in braziers in scabby back yards, beer-drinking, claw-hammer-wielding and endless grunting of the F and C words. Most of the gang-members, impressive though they look (many of them Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of the malignant fantasist Carl Beech is one of the more iniquitous episodes in British legal history, a stomach-turning swamp of lies, gullibility and heinous incompetence. It shook faith in some of our supposedly most robust institutions to the core, and Beech’s lies tainted the reputations of some innocent victims who went to their graves with a shadow still hanging over them.Vanessa Engle’s documentary (BBC Two) told Beech's story with a sardonic eye, though the repeated jokey images of a Pinocchio figure tended to undermine the gravity of the tale. In 2012 Beech had cashed in Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok. Arielle (Thorne) is a provocative Florida teen whose sole desire is to become famous any way she can. After a video of Arielle beating up a girl in a night club goes viral, she sees her road to stardom lies in making videos of violent acts to boost her online profile. Having dragged reluctant ex-con Dean (Jake Manley) along for the ride, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah shone a blinding light on the Camorra crime clans of Naples, and spun off an acclaimed film and equally admired TV series. This film version of his 2016 novel La paranza dei bambini (“The Children’s Gang”) isn’t in the same league as either of those, but its account of the way criminality is a kind of hereditary condition in some areas of Naples still packs a punch.Star of the show is 15-year-old Nicola (Francisco di Napoli), leader of one of the teenage gangs who scrap it out around town (the opening scene features a balletic fight in a shopping mall, with the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s taken over 18 years for Artemis Fowl to reach the big screen, with Miramax originally buying the rights in 2001. Finally, Disney have brought the world’s youngest criminal mastermind to life, but was it worth the wait? Well, the fact it’s appearing on streaming service Disney+ rather than waiting for a cinematic release probably answers that question.Loosely based on Eoin Colfer’s popular novels and helmed by Kenneth Branagh, 12-year-old Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw) must save his kidnapped father by infiltrating the secret society of fairies, dwarves and goblins. Alongside his bodyguard Read more ...