crime
Fiona Sturges
“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem. There was the girl from the estate over the road - “all big earrings and attitude” - dropping litter outside his house and then shouting abuse when he suggested she pick it up. There was the unspeakable package shoved through the letterbox shortly after he complained to the girl’s school and got her suspended. And there was the lucrative deal with developers that Ted may or Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Bunting is currently serving 11 life sentences. He was Australia’s serial killer. A murderous manipulator masquerading as a vigilante, he brought young people, their family members and a disenfranchised suburban community into his madness. Snowtown dramatises these deeply distressing events.Produced by Warp Films - also behind the challenging Tyrannosaur - Snowtown slots into a lineage with the fictive Funny Games and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the fact-based Bundy. Like Ted Bundy, Bunting was a charmer. He wheedled his way into a fractured household on the edges of Adelaide Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Olympics will be upon us all any minute now, but for the residents of East London they have been physically sprouting at the end of the road in the shape of a futuristic stadium for years. It takes the role of a shy walk-on in Wild Bill, a looming symbol of a local regeneration which was touted as integral to the hosting bid. It’s safe to say that the London seen here will not earn the grateful rubberstamp of the Cultural Olympiad. If you could get onto a podium for knifing, gashing, stabbing, thumping and thrashing, the characters we meet here could have been contenders. They’d probably Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Despite an unfortunate title which seemed to have fallen from the pages of the latest Cosmo sex survey (“add some spice to the bedroom: try reverse missionary”), the first instalment of this three-part series about faith, community and religious history had honourable intentions. Its starting premise was that Britain is not just broken but “saturated in secularism”, and throughout it acted as though both presumptions were not only a) true and b) indisputably Bad Things, but also that one was directly responsible for the other.On paper the idea had a neat symmetry. A religious leader from a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Contrary to what he said in 1963, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not close Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Although the last inmate appeared to leave the San Francisco Bay island fortress in leg-irons on 21 March 1963, the prisoners and guards had vanished into thin air, leaving it the Marie Celeste of prisons. The cover-up worked. But now, one-by-one, without having aged, the prisoners are back, blazing a trial of murderous mayhem across modern-day San Francisco.Mixing crime, conspiracy and the fantastic, JJ Abrams’s new series is made from familiar elements. Alcatraz isn’t Lost. Like Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery. From the pen of pulp writer James Ellroy (who co-wrote the script with Moverman), Rampart veers fascinatingly between cinéma vérité authenticity Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, an aspiring beauty queen becomes an unwitting accomplice in the dirty deeds of a criminal gang. If it sounds like the plot of a cheap thriller, it isn’t – it’s visceral and uncommon, capturing the ferocity and reach of Mexico’s criminal underworld and the terror of being caught in its crossfire.
After witnessing a massacre and confiding in a (unbeknownst to her) corrupt police officer, a shell-shocked Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) find herself in the grubby hands of the perpetrators. Dragged from one hideous predicament to another, her life becomes a blur Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Further advancing the theory that television is the place for pedigree actors to be seen nowadays, Dustin Hoffman makes his TV debut in HBO's Luck, which kicks off on Saturday 18 February on Sky Atlantic. A complex, multi-stranded saga about horse racing and the rich mix of characters who swarm around it, Luck is directed by Michael Mann (of Heat, Miami Vice and Manhunter fame) and written and created by David Milch, whose credits include NYPD Blue and Deadwood.Hoffman, who plays just-out-of-jail crime boss Chester "Ace" Bernstein, recalled how he'd finally been lured to the small screen." Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Calling Zift hard-boiled undersells it. This Bulgarian film is so tough, it’s as though director Javor Gardev blow-torched the conventions of film noir so the picture he paints from the ashes is pure black. It’s in black and white, and had to be. Despite the darkness and violence, Zift is a compelling, breathless ride which flies by.The word "zift" has a few meanings. Medically, it’s the acronym for Zygote Intrafallopian Transfer. In Bulgarian slang it doubles for shit. It’s also Bulgarian for tar, wads of which were a predecessor of chewing gum. Zift’s main man Moth (Zachary Baharov) is a Read more ...
ash.smyth
I have to confess it was about five minutes in to Dennis Kelly’s DNA last night before I concluded, definitively, that I had seen it before. Four years ago, it was part of the Connections programme at the National Theatre – a scheme for generating short, double-billable, "youth"-friendly plays that, practically speaking, don’t require the operating budget and elephant-handlers of a Veronese Aïda.But Kelly’s star is now in the ascendant – he is better known, principally, as Mr Matilda – and his quietly simmering ensemble piece is embarking on a national tour, in a production by Hull Truck. A “ Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It certainly started with a bang. The whirlwind opening sequence of the BBC's new four-part drama depicted a cash depot heist by a masked gang unfolding in something close to real time, and thrummed with blood and nervous tension. Security guard Chris was shot in the leg. His boss, John Coniston, was roughed up. Back at home, his family were being held hostage at gunpoint. Both men, it transpired, were in on the job, while warehouse worker Marcus was one of the armed gang. Inside Men, clearly, was going to be why- rather than a whodunnit.The heist took place in September. The remainder of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may think that Whitechapel's USP would have made a third unlikely after two successful mini-series. The first was about a modern-day copycat killer in Whitechapel who was recreating the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, while the second was about a modern-day copycat killer who was recreating the Kray twins murders from the 1960s. Now the East End of London may be, in estate agents' terms, a vibrant place, but there are only so many bloodthirsty periods from its history to spawn yet another modern-day psychopath.The third season, which started last night, consists of three two-parters and the Read more ...