crime
Jasper Rees
Since Prime Suspect introduced television viewers to the writing of Lynda La Plante, the concept of event television has lost a little of its lustre. Such was the remarkable heft of La Plante’s storyline about a serial killer and Helen Mirren’s performance as DI Jane Tennison that schedulers have ever since been sending out their pedigree crime dramas in great big lumpy chunks. Twenty years on, La Plante doesn’t quite kick down the door the way she used to. Above Suspicion is back for a fourth formulaic turn around the block and it’s going out not on three consecutive drop-everything evenings Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Diehard Morsians have been harbouring murderous thoughts ever since it was announced. No doubt they communicate these to one another in fiendish acrostics and cryptic clues. It was one thing giving Lewis his own spin-off, quite another to bring Morse back to life in the form of a prequel. The heretical suggestion of Endeavour is that the grumpy old sleuth did not in fact spring fully formed into the world in the shape of John Thaw, with that slow world-weary lope and a withering glare lurking in those iridescent peepers.Well, at least the eyes have it. Shaun Evans is in most respects a Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Many have dismissed 2011 as cinematically something of a disappointment, but while close inspection may have identified more cubic zirconia than bona fide diamonds, the year glittered nevertheless. The showstopping Mysteries of Lisbon was undoubtedly the real deal - what a teasing, sumptuous and gorgeously strange film that was (even with a running time in excess of four hours). Iranian domestic drama, A Separation, was similarly sublime - if less grand - and French silent (yes, silent) comedy The Artist (pictured below right) had hard-faced movie scribes grinning idiotically at the year’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director. Then Dassin relocated to France, where he created the noir masterpiece - and the third Read more ...
Gillian Slovo
I was shocked by the riots. I think everybody was shocked by the riots. It’s not just the scale of the rioting that was shocking. It’s the failure of the police and the fire services to take control of the situation. During my research for The Riots I interviewed a man who had his flat burned down and he told me that he couldn’t believe this could happen in a democracy.I was actually in the Scottish Highlands during the riots so I watched it on TV while friends in London called and texted to tell me what was happening (Slovo pictured below right; image by Charlie Hopkinson). The scale of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
People speak to her. It could be her mother. It could be a colleague. But she doesn’t react, continues what she’s doing. Which, usually, is leaving. It’s welcome back to Sarah Lund, whose watchability is in inverse proportion to her demonstrativeness. As recalcitrant detective Lund, in the second series of Denmark’s The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl is as magnetic as the first time around, whatever she’s wearing. Sweaters be damned, these two opening episodes were up there with the BAFTA-winning first series.After the lash-ups of the first series – the killing of her detective partner, serial Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Snowtown gets as close as a film can to making you feel serial-killing’s human cost. It’s hard to thank Australian director Justin Kurzel for his extraordinary debut, so grim is the story it tells. But he and writer Shaun Grant have done a selfless, unsensationalist job of memorialising the 12 people murdered by a gang led by John Bunting in an Adelaide suburb, Snowtown, between 1992 and 1999. Kurzel, who grew up nearby, filmed in the area, and cast many non-professional locals. This authenticity is a sort of homage to the victims.We’ve been to Australia’s suburban badlands before, in Rowan Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apart from voting, there is only one duty the United Kingdom asks of its residents: if, or less likely when, it comes, to answer the summons to sit and listen to evidence in a criminal court and, with 11 other randomly selected individuals, reach a collective decision about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Trial by jury is rightly held to be one of the more unimpeachable achievements of civilised society.The jurors being emblematically the nice guys in this national success story, they are also the colourless guys. Which is why legal dramas – and there have been perhaps a dozen of them Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having won early acclaim for his student feature film Under the Sun, Swiss-born but Germany-based director Baran bo Odar has taken a further leap forward with his commercial debut, The Silence. Based on a novel by Jan Costin Wagner, it's the story of the hunt for the killer of 13-year-old schoolgirl Sinikka Weghamm, whose disappearance uncannily mirrors that of 11-year-old Pia Lange 23 years earlier.Though the story is naturally concerned to some extent with police procedure, Odar's real interest is in the corrosive, unending effects of loss, loneliness, grief and guilt, which affect many of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Miss Bala, just to clear it up at the start, does not concern itself with beauty pageants. Or not like Miss Congeniality. Beauty is indeed involved in the form of Laura, a pretty young Mexican woman from a poor family who aspires to win the crown of Miss Baja California. Never has the advice to be careful what you wish for been more apposite. Confronting beauty there is a beast in the form of the organised drugs trade which corrodes and toxifies all who come near it: police, military, civilians, indeed the whole body politic in a country which, in the final credits, advises that 36,000 lives Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many commentators have professed bafflement at the tangled layers of Hidden, as it probed into a sick and murky past while apparently dead characters came back to haunt the present. Right to the end, writer Ronan Bennett kept his cards carefully concealed, so we still don't know who was really behind the sinister "Helpdesk" and its slick dial-a-killer operating system. Or at least it was slick at killing everybody except protagonists Harry (Phil Glenister) and Gina (Thekla Reuten), who somehow managed to wriggle away from their pursuers on a record-breaking number of occasions.But Hidden Read more ...