crime
Jasper Rees
They don’t make boxers like Freddie Mills any more. A granite lump of grinning charisma, he had a brow and jawline straight from a kids’ cartoon and, despite his humble origins and thuggish contours, a charmingly well-to-do voice. Mills was light heavyweight world champ for a time, then drifted into showbiz and, eventually, running a nightclub in Soho. Then he died in sudden and mysterious circumstances.His body was found in the back of his Citroen on the night of 24 July 1965. There was a single shot from air rifle through his right eye, from which dangled a lone blob of congealed blood. The Read more ...
Owen Richards
Childhood is an inimitable experience – the laws of the world are less certain, imagination and reality meld together, and no event feels fixed. A Sicilian Ghost Story recreates this sensation in the context of real world trauma, producing a unique and sometimes unsettling cinematic experience.Luna (Julia Jedlikowska, pictured below) is a rather typical 12-year-old girl: precocious, imaginative, and very much infatuated with her classmate Giuseppe. Although they don’t have the same interests, they share something deeper, a comfort and belonging in each other’s company. On the walk home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some contend that this Snowdonia-set mystery was a Scandi hommage too far, a mere recycler of gloom-shrouded riffs familiar from the likes of The Bridge or The Killing. Well yes, there was that element to it, but if you stuck with it it grew into far more than a mere copycat procedural.For a start, it wasn’t your average whodunnit, since the killer’s identity was made pretty clear as early as the first episode. Instead, the eight-part series was more of a whydunnit, as the screenwriters probed methodically into the background, motivation and psychology of Dylan Harris (Rhodri Meilir, pictured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So it’s back to London’s Bishop Street police station for a third series of screenwriter Chris Lang’s cold case saga. The understated rapport of lead duo DI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DS Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) has become one of TV’s mini-treasures, and it was all present and correct in this opening episode.It started, as these things often will, with the discovery of a body. Workmen were digging a drainage trench at the bottom end of the M1 when they chanced upon what turned out to be a human hip bone. The rest of the skeleton wasn’t far away, and soon forensic bods were poring Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) and directed by Jean-Marc Valleé (who helmed last year’s award-winning Big Little Lies), HBO’s Sharp Objects arrives trailing a cloud of great expectations. Happily – albeit depressingly given its corrosively dark subject matter – it exerts its grip with increasing force, once you’ve committed yourself to stick with it past the first couple of episodes.Mining the kind of steamy, silently menacing American hinterland also exploited by the likes of True Detective or Justified, Sharp Objects whisks us to the small town of Wind Gap, Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Force of Evil is much more than a stunning film noir classic: it’s first and foremost a film about money and power and their tragic power of attraction. Set in the world of the numbers racket in New York, where the big combinations, created by gangsters who've barely gone legit, are pitted against the smaller "banks", or players. This Hobbesian struggle feeds off the lesser but still significant desire of the betting man on the street, driven by hopeless dreams and always close to the breadline.The story, based on a novel by Ira Wolfert, and adapted by Polonsky himself for his first film as a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perfectly timed, in theory, for the advent of #MeToo and Hollywood’s post-Weinstein era, this girl-power redesign of the Ocean franchise has lined up a turbo-charged cast and then not given them anything very interesting to do. Director and co-writer Gary Ross (The Hunger Games, Free State of Jones) was probably wise not to try to replicate the sleight-of-hand plotting, laconic wit and stiletto-sharp editing of Stephen Soderberg’s Ocean flicks, but the unfortunate consequence is that Ocean’s 8 often ends up lapsing into a glammed-up vacuum.The set-up is that Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Miles, a henchman for a gloriously nasty casino owner called Amara de Escalones (Lidia Porto, pictured below) in Pahrump, Nevada, knows this full well – he spends his days collecting kickbacks and crushing corpses in a car-compactor – but chooses to ignore it as he dreams of escaping his scuzzy existence and making it in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.Hidden (or Craith in Welsh) stems from the same BBC Cymru Wales/S4C provenance as Hinterland, with whom it also shares the executive-producing fingerprints of Mark Andrew and Ed Talfan. Likewise, it echoes the eeriness and sense of isolation of its predecessor, exploiting spectacular but melancholy Snowdonia scenery to evoke a steady undertone of dread and horrors hidden in the undergrowth.There had to be a corpse to kick Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Regular air travel is a hassle. All that queuing, all that security, all those hot halls, and then the endless waiting, the bawling kids and the limited legroom. Basically air travel sucks. But at least it’s reasonably safe. The same cannot be said for irregular air travel: stowaways who slip into the wheel wells of planes. Some 96 people have tried this way of avoiding border checks – and most have died. This new play by Fiona Doyle, who won the playwriting Papatango Prize in 2014, was inspired by one such case, that of Jose Matada, who died in 2012. Her play was shortlisted for the Susan Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Right from the beginning of Simon Evans’s production of Tracy Letts's 1993 play, it’s clear we’re in for an intense, raw experience. A storm of almost symphonic musical accompaniment roars, lightning flashing over the claustrophobic trailer interior where the tight two hours-plus run of Killer Joe will play out.Star billing here, of course, goes to Orlando Bloom, who's back on the West End stage after a decade away, in the title role as the corrupt cop who doubles as a hitman. But Grace Smart’s set deserves no less of a round of applause (main picture): it takes over the compact space of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“He’s not a sideshow attraction,” we hear towards the end of Marc Meyers’s queasily compelling My Friend Dahmer, when one of the “Dahmer Fan Club”, a group of high school sham-friends-cum-taunters who have been treating the film’s teen protagonist as if he was just that, has second thoughts. Encouraging him to throw pretend fits – they call it “spazzing” – first around school, later in public, they have seen it as some sort of “cool” provocation, a hilarious disruption. The bullied outsider Jeff appears content to go along with it, gratified by the semblance of inclusion that it seems to Read more ...