sun 23/03/2025

crime

The Firm, Hampstead Theatre review - ferociously funny exploration of gang culture

We are living in a time when gang culture rips and roars its way down London streets, and through newspaper headlines, at increasingly alarming levels. Recent news reports revealed how a surge in knife and gun crime is leading to more young black...

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Line of Duty, BBC One, series 5 finale review - big highs and Biggeloe

The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for...

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Line of Duty, Series 5, BBC One review - already it's dark, dirty and dangerous

Congratulations to Stephen Graham, guest-starring in this fifth season of BBC One’s Line of Duty, for still being alive at the end of episode one, a favour not routinely granted to headline names in Jed Mercurio’s diabolical labyrinth of deception....

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Out of Blue review - noir and cosmology collide

At the start of Carol Morley’s noir mystery Out of Blue, detective Mike Hoolihan, bleary-eyed and slow, is carrying some burdensome weight. “This burger from last night is not sitting right,” comes the weary female investigator’s first line....

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The Bay, ITV, review - Broadchurch goes north

In the 1970s, the Mancunian stand-up Colin Crompton had a famous routine about Morecambe. He characterised Morecambe as “a sort of cemetery with lights” where “they don't bury their dead, they stand them up in bus shelters with a bingo ticket in...

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Shetland, Series 5 Finale, BBC One review - Sicario-on-Sea?

Thing is, a lot of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if DI Jimmy Perez had just watched the second series of The Missing. From this he could have deduced that there was every chance that Derek Riddell (who plays Chris Brooks in Shetland (...

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Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feeling

Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having...

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Shetland, Series 5, BBC One review - uneven start to new season

And so back to the windswept landscapes of the Shetland archipelago, where stoical DI Jimmy Perez is still keeping the bad guys at bay while continuing to cope with life as an ageing widower. You do wonder, though, how he sustains his commitment to...

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Endeavour, Series 6, ITV review - reassuringly accomplished return of the brainy copper

The end of series five of Endeavour found PC George Fancy shot dead, Cowley police station closed and the old crew dispersed. With Led Zeppelin on the soundtrack (it’s 1969), the sixth series opened minus WPC Trewlove, but with Fred Thursday demoted...

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Can You Ever Forgive Me? review - no page unturned in a comedy about literary forgery

What is it with all these new films based on biographies? Vice, Green Book, The Mule, Stan & Ollie, Colette… and that’s before we even get to the royal romps queening up our screens. At least Can You Ever Forgive Me? brings a lifestory...

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The Mule review - good ol' boy rides again

Baggage can weigh a movie down. The Mule comes with quite a bit of baggage, and not just the kilos of coke stashed in the car’s trunk. Clint Eastwood’s fifty plus years as a screen icon turned director, his dodgy love life and libertarian politics...

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Destroyer review - Kidman shines in middling crime drama

Destroyer. It’s an apt name. Like the film, it's grandiose and blunt. Nicole Kidman is almost unrecognisable (a requirement when aiming for nominations) as Detective Erin Bell, a damaged survivor of an undercover heist gone wrong. When her target...

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