crime
James Saynor
It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly. It’s not a choice many – or perhaps any – male filmmakers might make. But Sujo comes from the female writing and directing duo of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, and for them violence arrives in the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. ENO has lately borne the brunt of drive-by funding massacres by the ruthless (and opera-loathing) capi who control the UK arts-subsidy game. We get the appeal of guaranteed crowd-pleasers and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance into literary form.A satire on contemporary Britain, an analysis of the political tectonics of the last 40 years, a thoughtful meditation on why writers write – The Proof of My Innocence is all these things, but its starting point is a howl of rage about the fact we can’t just enjoy a quiet train journey any more.Coe operates partly through Read more ...
Nick Hasted
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves await the unluckiest. It faithfully adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Nickel Boys, whose writing’s loving warmth made its horrors bearable, his hope for his characters outlasting their fates.Ellwood (Ethan Cole Sharp) is a serious-minded schoolboy in Tallahassee, Florida, driven by Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights protests and an Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest incarnation of David Mitchell, TV actor, looks at first sight much like the familar one from Peep Show and Back. Not a pufflepant in sight. His only costume change for Ludwig is a pair of wire-frame spectacles. HIs role is pretty familiar too: a buttoned-down individual who culturally favours the classics over the popular, the corduroy sports coat over the tracksuit. Presumably a fan of Beethoven, he has adopted the pen-name Ludwig for his line of work; behind the name he is John Taylor, bachelor. But fate calls him to apply his skills forensically, and he joins the line Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely. Written by Anna Symon, this six-part series is based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington, whose light-fingered accomplishments earned her notoriety back in the Eighties. Some apparently referred to her as “The Godmother”, though they don’t here.Stepping boldly and brassily into the lead role is Sophie Turner (who, once upon a time, played Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones). We first meet her when she’s living with Gary, a brutal, womanising thug who she eventually decides to leave Read more ...
James Saynor
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing good business for Hollywood before and since.We root for them and we don’t root for them at the same time, which is perhaps why not everyone in Hollywood has agreed with the hotcake thing. Queasy marketeers have often underestimated the likely box office of mad-killer pics – from Psycho (1960) through The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and then on to Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was also seen as a bit of a gamble by its studio in 2019.The Warner Bros sequel to that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing their technological grip.The train is called "The Heart of Britain", and it’s the night sleeper service from Glasgow to Euston. Some viewers may detect resemblances between this and Idris Elba’s Apple TV plane-drama Hijack, or (in a more rail-orientated vein) Snowpiercer, but Nightsleeper does at least have the distinction – well, kind of – of being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for an incomprehensible 30 years.Sambre is based on the journalist Alice Géraud’s 2023 book about the case. It’s a mature piece, more drama than documentary, that isn’t concerned with standard crime-mystery twists that slowly ratchet up suspense. Here the man charged with raping 56 women in northeastern France between 1988 and 2018 is clearly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...