crime
Nick Hasted
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) was Fritz Lang’s final film, resurrecting his Weimar villain in Cold War Berlin and forming a satisfying circle with his career’s German first half, which included Metropolis and M. This ended when Goebbels banned The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), leading to equally brilliant Hollywood exile, and the hard shadows of fierce classics from Fury to The Big Heat.Lang’s M star, Peter Lorre, ended his exile earlier with his sole film as director, The Lost One (1951), a searing parable of Nazi corruption, madness and murder which was too much for his homeland. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “thriller/mystery” umbrella – Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Ken Follett and Harlan Coben, to name but four. Still, as eagerly as his fans may await their yearly fix, he always manages to surprise.Scores of popular authors have had other professional lives which they mine for verisimilitude, and so with Grisham: a significant proportion of his novels (forty-four in all now) have made superbly imaginative Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since it debuted in November last year, Apple TV+ has barely made a dent in a market largely shaped by Netflix, but this eight-part adaptation of William Landay’s bestselling novel is a decisive step in the right direction. It’s a mixture of courtroom drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller, and if it sometimes falls back on familiar genre-ish cliches, the show can boast some fine performances and possesses the critical ingredient of watchability. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to know how it ends (and the TV version has a significantly different ending from the book).Casting Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has made a career crafting perceptive and cerebral examinations of his native country. From his 2006 debut 12:08 to Bucharest to The Treasure, they were cerebral films that powerfully embodied the Romanian New Wave. With his latest film The Whistlers, Porumboiu shows he’s capable of being both a brilliant filmmaker and playful at the same time. It’s an impish noir thriller, full of femme fatales, crooked cops and sun-drenched islands. We begin on the island of La Gomera, the pearl of the Canary Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Between 1972-1992 five series of Van der Valk were made for ITV, starring Barry Foster as the eponymous Amsterdam detective. Nearly 30 years later comes this reincarnation with Marc Warren in the title role, no doubt hoping to find a regular home in the juicy two-hour Sunday night slot.Does it work? Well… up to a point, though there’s still that air of artificiality that’s hard to overcome when you set a basically British cop show in a foreign city. Check Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander for further evidence. The recruitment of a sizeable squad of Dutch actors eases this somewhat (they may be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider equipping yourself with a shotgun and kevlar body armour before you start watching Gangs of London (Sky Atlantic), because this is a bruising, hair-raising ride. Created by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery, it began with the televisual equivalent of being thrown from a fast-moving vehicle, as we saw a terrified man dangling on a rope over the edge of a high-rise building. His captor then doused him in petrol and set fire to him, his blazing body eventually plummeting to the pavement far below.Deliberately or not, the effect of this double-length opener was like being engulfed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A camel is a horse designed by committee, they say; perhaps that explains why The Host, with several writing credits – adapted by Zachary Weckstein from a story by Laurence Lamers, screenplay by Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Lamers – doesn't really know what it is. Part suspense thriller, part crime caper, but mostly a Hitchcock rip-off (although I'm sure the creators would call it “homage”).It starts so promisingly, with Saul Bass-esque opening titles, but then we get into tale that becomes bogged down with trivial details. After being dumped by the married colleague with whom he has Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“They say we all have a beast locked up inside of us,” a character observes early in this Korean crime movie. Monsters are certainly chewing at the moral fibre of police captains Jung (Lee Sung-min) and Han (Yoo Jae-myung) as they corruptly pursue promotion. The serial killer they race to capture, like the schoolgirl he’s torn to pieces, become incidental to ambition, and the tendrils of vengeance which turn jungle-thick in its wake.Jung-ho Lee’s remake of the French thriller 36th Precinct, which starred Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil as romantic as well as career rivals, throws elements Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While not the most headline-catching show on Netflix, Ozark has been steadily accruing critical accolades (including a couple of Emmys) and a devoted audience. Perhaps this superb third series will mark the tipping point where Ozark crosses over from cliqueishness to mass adulation.It all began back with the first season in 2017, when Marty Byrde’s Chicago-based financial services company fell foul of their client, a Mexican drug cartel. Marty’s partner made the insane blunder of skimming off $8m of the cartel’s funds, which their company were supposed to be laundering. Long story short, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Liar, one of many thrillers from the fertile keyboards of Jack and Harry Williams, was on ITV back in 2017, so you may have forgotten the somewhat labyrinthine details. In a nutshell, smarmy surgeon and serial rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) had been unmasked by the dogged (and sometimes illegal) methods of one of his 19 victims, schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). However, before the police could arrest him, his dead body was found in the marshes on the Kent coast, with its throat cut. End of series one.An early revelation in this new season was that DI Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With prison overcrowding reaching chronic proportions, police in County Durham have developed the Checkpoint programme to try to keep offenders out of jail with rehabilitation in the community. It’s like Felons Anonymous – candidates have to sign a contract confessing their crimes and stipulating that they won’t reoffend. They get one chance, and if they break the pledge they’ll end up behind bars.Some find it easier than others to kick their criminal habits, but according to statistics we were shown, prisoners released from jail were more than twice as likely to reoffend as Checkpoint “ Read more ...
Owen Richards
He's one of Japan's foremost directors, and if you’ve witnessed one of his films before, you know what to expect from a Takashi Miike yakuza film. High-octane, boundary pushing fun from first frame to last. And that’s exactly what First Love is.The plot is simultaneously complicated and simple. The ambitious but hapless Kase plans on stealing drugs from his own yakuza boss and blame it on the triads. This involves his cop accomplice killing Monica, an escort prone to hallucinations. But when a young boxer, Leo, steps in to save Monica, the whole plan starts to fall apart.What follows is an Read more ...