crime
Adam Sweeting
This will have brought a nostalgic tear to the eye of fans of The Sweeney (the TV show, not the Ray Winstone movie) or GF Newman's still-shocking 1978 series Law and Order. The producers had rounded up seven retired policepersons and got them to spill some of the beans about what policing was like in the Sixties and Seventies.The strange thing was, it was exactly like folklore says it used to be. There was plenty of rough justice including kickings and beatings, dousings in freezing cold baths and possibly even some electric shocks. Rule-bending was de rigueur, there was routine acceptance by Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Your law is too soft. Make it more strict.” An Albanian illegal immigrant suspected of handling stolen goods was unimpressed by the courtesy extended to him by Bedfordshire Police. Too many pleases and thank yous, he complained. In Tirana the rozzers probably don’t ask you if you have any food allergies.The thin blue line has launched Operation Charm Offensive. In September Channel 4 broadcast Cops and Robbers about how police in the West Midlands deal with serial petty offenders, and they came over as secular saints. Next year there’s a big BBC One series inside the Met, who are presumably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Derived from a Dennis Lehane short story called Animal Rescue, at one level The Drop is indeed a tale of one man and his dog, a pit bull puppy rescued from a dustbin in Brooklyn. But given the opportunity to develop the story into a screenplay for Belgian director Michaël R Roskam (of Bullhead fame), Lehane has created a subtly detailed milieu of crushed hopes, pervasive fear and simmering criminality.The piece opens with a voice-over in a whiny Brooklyn accent, as if we might be in Scorsese land or Sopranos world. It's a jolt to discover that the voice belongs, entirely plausibly, to the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Given the long shadow cast by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, it’s sort of surprising that no drama department has commissioned something like The Missing before. It’s not the same story of course. The child alluded to in the title is a five-year-old boy, not a three-year-old girl, and he’s abducted in France rather than Portugal. But it’s impossible not to be aware of the story’s factual parallel. And the parental trauma as the awful truth dawns is, one can only imagine, exactly the same.The difference is that The Missing is shaping up to be a thriller. A thriller by its very nature Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale and (coming soon) Ben Affleck have all had a go at playing the fully-formed Caped Crusader, though for some Adam West's ludicrously campy Sixties incarnation remains the score to beat. But apparently that's still not enough. Hitched firmly to the ongoing craze for exploiting any nook and cranny of superhero folklore, Gotham whizzes us back to the story's embryonic days, when 12-year-old Bruce Wayne has lost his parents in a seemingly random double murder and has yet to emerge in his full Dark Knight regalia.The challenge here was to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jack Thorne's new eight-part drama is set in a fictional but recognisable small English village, Overton, where life is centred on farming and racehorses. A green and pleasant land? Not so much; this is a series with a group of pill-popping, shagging teenagers at its heart – well, it is from the man who wrote Skins.In the opener, we meet the group of friends as they play a game of chicken, jumping into a huge grain silo. It's reckless, but it's fun, as is drinking all night then stealing a car and driving like a maniac through the narrow country lanes. And when it all goes wrong and one Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fans of this dense and rewarding odyssey of Prohibition and American gangsterism are doubtless still reeling from the news that its fifth series will be the last, despite the riotous applause which greeted series four. This unwelcome state of affairs perhaps accounted for the vaguely dissociated and dream-like quality of this season opener, which was as much concerned with filling in some of Nucky Thompson's early history as with driving the plot forward into the 1930s.An opening sequence set in 1884, of young boys diving into the sea to catch gold coins flung from the Atlantic City pier by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The frozen north of Norway seems an unlikely spot for a Serbian drug gang to be operating alongside a local mob, but this is the world which snow-plough driver Nils meets head on when avenging the death of his son. Throw in larger-than-life characters, cartoonish but very strong violence and a beautiful snowy backdrop and the result is the Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, a revenge drama which doles out its thrills at a pace in total contrast to the bleak serenity of the landscape which defines this part of the world.This formula has been seen before, most notably in the Norwegian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Returning to the small town you grew up in after a spell in the big city can often be problematic. Old friends now think you’re a big shot. The familiar is seen in a new light, and not necessarily a good one. There’s a sense that the ties which have been slackened might be irrevocably sheared. In Mystery Road, Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan is a cop back in outback Queensland, in north-east Australia, after training. Now a detective, he quickly finds it’s sink or swim.But that’s not his only problem. As an Aboriginal, he’s subjected to racism. He’s one of what’s called “this dark breed.” And as a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
"There are 32 ways to write a story...but there is only one plot - things are not as they seem" - wisdom, courtesy of author Jim Thompson and ominously quoted in We Gotta Get Out of This Place by Sue (Mackenzie Davis) before she's swept into a nightmarish story of her own, one that takes the shape of a Thompson-esque crime thriller where things, and more specifically people, are most certainly contrary to how they appear. The film is the confident directorial debut of brothers Simon and Zeke Hawkins, working from a knowing, double-cross-laden script by first-time screenwriter Dutch Southern. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Gordon Green is a director who's certainly not afraid to confound. His CV includes indie gems George Washington, All the Real Girls, comedy smash Pineapple Express and medieval misfire Your Highness. His previous feature Prince Avalanche was made in secret and starred Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as mismatched highway workers; it was sensitively shot, unpredictable and determinedly oddball. With Joe Green manages to harness Nicolas Cage's mad energy and channel it into something spectacular - something only a handful of directors have accomplished (David Lynch, Mike Figgis and Werner Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Common, Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC One drama about the effects of the joint enterprise law, seems at first sight to lack the topical horsepower of projects like Hillsborough. McGovern doesn’t disappoint, however, crafting from the apparent obscurity of an eighteenth-century statute intended to discourage aristocratic duels by implicating both parties a riveting, corkscrew-plotted narrative that brings to overdue public notice an easily abused and abusive regulation that today targets the opposite end of society.The didactic drive can, in lesser hands, flatten subtlety and exaggerate the obvious Read more ...