crime
Adam Sweeting
Although it's a period drama set in the dim and shadowy London of 1956, The Hour can’t help reminding us that the more things change, the more inclined they feel to do a brisk U-turn and fly back to hit us in the teeth. I even wondered whether the BBC had felt like pulling this first episode from the schedules, on account of the scene where chippy young BBC news journalist Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) slipped a bribe to a police officer to gain access to the corpse of a murder victim. In this particular week, it was uncannily close to the bone.Lyon himself would surely have relished being Read more ...
william.ward
Programmes about Italian organised crime made by the foreign media are always hampered by the finnicky nature of the beast itself: there is so much background detail that needs to be staked out at the outset that your head is whirling from information overload. Like its mainstream political parties, high-street banks and national daily newspapers, Italy has three, four or five times as many of each as any other European country of similar size.Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia didn’t really bother with a comparative overview, other than to inform us that the Camorra, the Naples-based Mafia, has killed Read more ...
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The leap from BBC Four to Channel 4 is more than the flick of a switch. Migrating from the BBC’s digital channel to its terrestrial broadcast has transformed the Danish noir drama Forbrydelsen. It's now in English. It’s become American. Copenhagen has been banished. The alchemist responsible is US TV network AMC. Channel 4’s screening of the US remake of The Killing will attract more viewers than BBC Four ever could, but it’s impossible to watch the Seattle-set makeover without thinking back to the originalMore than the elephant in the room, Forbrydelsen (called that here to distinguish Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a strange, shape-shifting thing Luther is. Storylines ebb and flow around Idris Elba's dauntingly huge central character like flotsam and debris borne along on a heaving swell, but the man himself wades imperiously through it all like the Colossus in an old Jason and the Argonauts movie. Gross professional misconduct, subterfuge and blatantly aiding and abetting criminal behaviour are all part of Luther's daily routine. It's quite easy to forget that he's supposed to be a copper.The show's disorientating aura gets an additional boost from the way seemingly crucial characters just go Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mainstream television drama has always shone a searching beam into the Stygian murk of society’s ills. But however laudable its campaigning credentials, a drama’s first duty to its audience is to work as drama. Cathy Come Home changed the public perception of homelessness, unemployment acquired a catchphrase in Boys from the Black Stuff, and institutional racism met its match in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. But we know them first and foremost as great television. Last night Stolen tackled child trafficking, the pernicious growth industry annually accounting for the movement of £12 billion Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I see there are still a few brave souls trying to peddle the "searing televisual masterpiece" line, often in high-profile BBC publications, but I suspect rather more of us may have been veering towards an ever-healthier scepticism as Hugo Blick's wilfully obtuse noirathon ran around in increasingly demented circles. I wouldn't go as far as theartsdesk commenter "Gengis Cohen", who characterises The Shadow Line as "dreadful plotless, sub-Pinteresque nonsense" before really warming to his theme... but after a couple of drinks, y'know, you start thinking maybe he's not all that wrong.Having Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A year ago when Luther battered down the door like a wailing banshee in bovver boots on day release, it was all a bit underwhelming. People shrugged and wondered whether Idris Elba was condemned to roam in eternal script limbo. They weren’t at all sure about Ruth Wilson’s parricidal astrosphysicist, all beestung, flame-maned and frog-boxed. If it started loopy, across six episodes it got ever so subtly loopier until its audience began to accept it for what it was: somewhere between a thuggish police procedural and Alice Through the Looking Glass. NB Wilson’s character was called Alice. She Read more ...
Graham Fuller
AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could reduce the theme of Fred Cavayé's Point Blank to "man races to save kidnapped wife", but that wouldn't give you the full flavour of the movie's remorseless pace or devilishly wrought internal mechanism, or the quality of its performances. Thanks to a seasoned cast who are adept at conveying the essence of a character with minimal dialogue, Point Blank (or À bout portant in French) lifts itself above cliché - well, most of the time - and enhances its essential thrillerishness with glimpses of emotional light and shade.Not that its individual components are especially Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Thanks to her evergreen bestseller Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson can call on an army of fans to buy her work whenever it appears in print. Its debut on screen is, perhaps, another matter. Will they buy the BBC’s rendition of Case Histories? Those who have not had the pleasure of reading it are less advantageously placed to grumble about hideous revisions, outrageous changes and all manner of infidelities. But even an Atkinson newbie might find it a bit rum that Scotland seems to be entirely populated by people with English accents.Welcome to the BBC casting department's Read more ...
howard.male
We all enjoy the moment when the detective loses his rag and lunges across the desk to grab the suspect by the lapels, but such scenes are in short supply in this new female crime-fighters series. Instead, the interrogative approach of “the new Cagney & Lacey” as it’s been called, is more slowly, slowly catchy monkey, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Scott & Bailey was co-created by former detective inspector Diane Taylor, which is presumably why it seems to provide a more grounded, realistic look at the world of the Manchester murder squad.But whereas realism in the Read more ...