crime
Jasper Rees
A year ago to the day the BBC laid on a festive slaughter of Agatha Christie characters. And Then There Were None had the look of a well-dressed abattoir as her victims toppled like ninepins at the hands of an invisible slayer. The scriptwriter Sarah Phelps has returned to the queen of crime for this year’s two-part Christmas murder mystery. The source for The Witness for the Prosecution is a mere 23-page story in which there’s really only house room for one corpse. It belongs to the unfortunate Emily French (Kim Cattrall), a hot-to-frot society dame of a certain vintage who has a weakness Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So this is Christmas – and what have they done? Scheduled a detective drama that begins with a family being carved up with an axe. Ho ho ho! While Maigret’s Dead Man was no doubt intended to provide a healthy corrective to the festive feel-goodery of Call The Midwife on BBC One, it goes too far. We could have done without the details of torture (a candle-flame to naked breasts) and bloody execution. At least it doesn’t show them (the details, not the breasts).Nor is there any sign of Noël in the rues moyennes de Paris (Hungary once again standing in for France). Happily, though, this is a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat. It’s a familiar story of amorality and betrayal – the most effective cops are those who think like criminals themselves and are willing to cross the line to nail their target – but told with such slick energy that all clichés are forgiven.Based on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another serial killer on prime time. In Dark Angel we had the grim story of Mary Ann Cotton, the Victorian poisoner who killed her husbands for the insurance. Meanwhile John Christie continues his grim work in Rillington Place. And now In Plain Sight introduces another chilling psychopath going about his business.While Christie is memorialised in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and in Richard Attenborough’s screen performance, viewers have far less to go on with Peter Manuel, who operated in the same post-war period as Christie and did most of his killing in Scotland. His Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Howard Brenton (Christie in Love) and Ruth Rendell (Thirteen Steps Down) are just two of the many writers inspired by the sordid goings-on in 1940s Notting Hill. John Reginald Christie was a postman, a policeman and a psychopath who, as a back-street abortionist, enjoyed killing for company. A fantasist with an iron grip, he ensured that his lodger, Tim Evans, was the first to be hanged for his crimes.Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, which highlighted the miscarriage of justice, ensured that Christie’s necrophiliac corpse would never rest in peace. It took 10 years for Kennedy’s book – Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For those new to this Irish crime series, a brief catch-up. Jack Taylor (played by Iain Glen at his world-weary best) is a hard-drinking maverick loner ex-cop who left the Garda Siochána (Ireland's police force) after hitting a politician to investigate cases as private detective. He says there aren't many of his kind in Ireland, as the job is “too close to being an informant – a dodgy concept”. He chases criminals in Galway City, pounding the streets in his old Garda blue greatcoat, and is ably abetted by Kate Noonan, an ex-colleague who passes on information from Garda databases (and who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★) is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.Many have pondered over the way the BBC likes to shovel hefty chunks of the licence fee in Poliakoff's direction, and their doubts may not be assuaged by Close to the Enemy, on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most poignant moment in Damilola: Our Loved Boy came when Richard Taylor visited the scene where his 10-year-old child was killed. “Is this where my son died?” he cried, horrified at the thought that his beautiful boy's life ended in a dirty stairwell on a scruffy estate, where he bled to death after being attacked by a group of older boys; a broken bottle severed a main artery.There were many equally moving scenes in Levi David Addai's feature-length drama, directed by Euros Lyn, which recounted not just the final few months of Damilola's life, but the painful and lasting effects his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could begin to wonder if The Accountant is part of a game of one-upmanship between Ben Affleck and his old buddy Matt Damon. If Matt can strike it big with Jason Bourne, the amnesiac super-lethal assassin, Ben can go one better – Christian Wolff, an autistic accountant and super-lethal assassin! That this movie is as enjoyable as it is is down to Affleck going beyond being merely strong and silent into an understatement almost as stylised and codified as Noh theatre. He lets slip sly one-liners as barely audible afterthoughts ("sorry," he murmurs, after interrupting an ongoing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.Merchant seamen Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive in London on the freighter Dunbar, which docks on the Thames in the heart of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction.In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light relief by bantering bad-temperedly with his trailer-neighbour and AA sponsor Kirby (William H Macy, pictured below Read more ...