crime
Adam Sweeting
Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind and body, nimbly evading cop show genre-pitfalls to bring us carefully-shaded characters operating within a Venn diagram of overlapping grey areas. Big kudos, yet again, to showrunner Anne Landois.Looking back at publicity photos from previous series of Spiral (the first one was shown on BBC Four in 2006), it’s shocking to see how much the cast Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No doubt McMafia has its strengths, but it’s like a mug of Horlicks compared to the grappa-with-aviation-fuel blast of Gomorrah (Sky Atlantic). The Naples-set organised crime drama takes no prisoners. It gives no quarter, and expects none.As a latecomer to Gomorrah, I needed to do a bit of homework before I began to get the hang of what’s going in series three. However, if you’re au fait with the first two seasons, you’ll know that the piece hinges on the tumultuous history of the Savastano dynasty, a powerful Camorra family accustomed to lording it over the unlovely streets of Naples’s Read more ...
Owen Richards
The new import is the latest procedural from Scandinavia, this time focusing on Stockholm’s biker gangs. The first episode aired Tuesday night, with the rest of the series available on All4 now. In the age of the boxset binge, this availability is usually a gift - but Before We Die’s forgettable first episode might struggle to convince viewers to log on and continue.We first met killjoy cop Hanna Svensson on a drugs bust – more specifically, arresting her own son Christian for dealing at a house party. After a rather low-key confrontation, he was taken away and she was left crying in the car Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It probably won’t take long for the title to be sawn in half. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will become casually known as Three Billboards and its specific location will drift into a vaguely remembered background. The place name is of a piece with Martin McDonagh’s previous visits to half-mythical places: Inishmore, Inishmaan, Leenane. Ebbing is everywhere and nowhere, a no-account small town in the faceless epicentre of the Midwest where a teenage girl can be raped and murdered and nothing much will be done about it.The eponymous billboards are stationed on the quiet country road Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s not the first time that James Norton has kicked off BBC One’s New Year primetime celebrations in Russian style. Two years ago, he was costumed up as the courageous Prince Andrei, in illustrious ensemble company for Andrew Davies and Tom Harper’s War and Peace. To say that Norton’s central role in McMafia, the new eight-parter created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins (who directs the full series), comes with rather more moral ambiguity would be an understatement.If Tolstoy measured human probity in living right by God (and settling your gambling debts), the denizens of this particular “ Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A new box-set to relish, six French cinema classics by a cult director, along with a wealth of fascinating extras on a seventh DVD. The French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville belongs to a class of his own: a precursor of the New Wave, an influence on Godard, Louis Malle and others, and a successor to French film noir directors such as Pierre Chenal and Edmond T Gréville.He is most celebrated for stylish thrillers in which archetypal gangsters and lawmen are pitted against each other in a complex duel that unfolds with the tragic predictability of classical Greek drama. These films are often Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Whatever the Waitrose and Morrisons commercials are telling you, as far as TV schedulers are concerned ‘tis the season for murder. Thus a Christmas Maigret has become an instant tradition, with Rowan Atkinson reprising his performance as Georges Simenon’s dolorous detective.He’s certainly better at it than he was when this new Maigret made his debut 18 months ago, and the production as a whole is getting the hang of finding the balance between the introspective and almost Jesuitical detective and the ugly violence and sleaze through which he moves. In the debut story, called simply Maigret, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Luca Changretta got his just desserts, Alfie Solomons made a last gasp for the quiet life, and Thomas Shelby revealed his true enemy – Peaky Blinders wrapped up another exciting series in a high-octane and neat finale.Tommy always has a way out; four series in and we still fall for it. In tonight’s final episode, it looked like his reckoning had finally arrived; Arthur’s death snapped Tommy into a violent rage in scenes reminiscent of last series’ capture of Vincente Changretta. It’s in these moments we witness the real Tommy; a terrifying and dangerous man who drags his family down with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.Writer-director Mike Hodges' intermittently brilliant career has taken several head-scratching turns (see also Flash Gordon). It’s to Michael Caine’s vanity-free credit that, having had the nerve to be unsympathetic hard man Jack Carter, he happily followed Hodges’ muse to become Pulp’s cynical hack writer Mickey King in the director's 1972 film.Righteous anger sours a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent televisual tradition for serving up the Queen of Crime as a Christmas treat. See also A Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None (which would have been joined by Ordeal by Innocence on Boxing Day until the BBC pulled it on learning that its star Ed Westwick was accused of rape and sexual assault).Adapted from the novel published in 1949 Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a mystery. Now you see it on the cover of the Radio Times. Now it’s in mothballs. The beneficiary of this hasty swerve was Bancroft. Originally made for ITV Encore, a channel which is about to become an ex-channel, it has suddenly come in from the cold.What does it say about a drama that was to have been launched in a graveyard where thousands not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of years ago, is a French cop show which knows what it’s talking about and does the simple stuff right.Eschewing the bright lights of Paris or the sumptuous sleaze of the Côte d'Azur, Witnesses – or Les Témoins, if you will – is set in northern France, where the skies tend to be grey and the air is cool and damp. There were sweeping shots Read more ...