crime
emma.simmonds
Feminism it certainly isn’t, though it is bizarrely refreshing to observe that the heroine fleeing a maniac in a state of comely undress is in her mid-forties. It might be baby steps rather than huge strides of progress but nevertheless, The Orphanage’s Belén Rueda once again makes a cheeringly mature and cerebral, yet still hauntingly beautiful scream siren. It’s a shame that Julia’s Eyes as a whole lacks her class and consistency.The Spanish director Guillem Morales’s second feature (after 2004’s The Uncertain Guest) is an entertaining shambles which begins with the death of Sara ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s got more derivations than a dictionary. The Wire has been mentioned in dispatches, as have British conspiracy dramas such as State of Play and Edge of Darkness (in which something is rotten etc). And talking of Denmark, it comes along with The Killing obsessives doing cold turkey. Even its creator has cited the guiding hand of cynical, labyrinthine Seventies crime thrillers – Flight of the Condor and The Parallax View. Put them all together and have you got a series which exists entirely in the long shadow cast by narratives which have passed this way before? Or can The Shadow Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV1 really, really loves that succulent two-hour slot in the middle of Sunday evening, and anything that goes in there has the legacy of Morse, Lewis, Frost, Miss Marple et al to live up to. The latest cunning plan for Detective Sunday is to recruit the rather excellent Brenda Blethyn to play DCI Vera Stanhope in adaptations of Ann Cleeves's novels, set in the author's native North-East.In fact, with the lineage of TV detectives now long enough to stretch to the moon and back several times, choice of location is becoming critical as a means of telling them apart. Vera is well served by its Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
The murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich: it’s hard to imagine a less likely subject for a musical, not least because the memory of the crimes of forklift-truck driver Steve Wright, committed in late 2006, is still so horribly fresh. But there is nothing lurid about this exceptional piece of theatre, created by Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork, and directed with restraint, tenderness and potent simplicity by Rufus Norris. It’s moving, fascinating and even funny. And if it is also occasionally shocking, it’s only because of its startling directness and honesty.Blythe habitually uses a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
According to her website, Martina Cole is "the person who tells it like it really is". If it's really like this dramatisation of her 1997 novel The Runaway, it's unrelentingly brutal, squalid and frightening, a televisual blow to the head from a blunt instrument. Perhaps the fact that the series was shot on a giant set in South Africa helps to account for its strange atmosphere of reality assembled from an Ikea-style flatpack.The Runaway of the title is, or is going to be in episode two, Cathy Connor (Joanna Vanderham). It's the early Sixties, and Cathy has been brought up in London's East Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Will Silk make it to series two, or will it feel the wrath of BBC One's mad axeman, Danny Cohen? The former, we fervently hope. Despite some implausible incidents and occasionally silly plotlines, Peter Moffat's battling-barristers drama reached the end of its first series looking stronger than when it started.Much credit for this must go to Maxine Peake's superb portrayal of Martha Costello, the pugnacious girl from the north country pitted against Rupert Penry-Jones's smooth and superior Clive Reader, as both of them strive for that coveted elevation to QC. It was difficult not to feel Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having amasssed bankable screenwriting kudos for Edge of Darkness and The Departed, William Monahan made his writer/director debut with London Boulevard, a reworking of Ken Bruen's novel burnished with useful marquee glitz from headliners Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley. However, some reviewers remained unconvinced by the flick's aura of "Guy Ritchie does Get Carter", and Monahan would have done himself a favour by dialling down the guns and geezerdom. Much as we love Ray Winstone, it was a little too predictable that he should turn up as the merciless über-villain, Gant.Nonetheless, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It'll be interesting to see what the recent race row - or more accurately, lack-of-race row - does for the ratings of Midsomer Murders. Possibly nothing, if the research that says that people from ethnic groups all hate the show and never watch it is to be believed. It certainly defies logic that producer Brian True-May has been made to walk the plank for saying that the programme has an all-white cast when... it does. Somehow, everybody has contrived not to mention this ever since Midsomer began in 1997.That aside, it was nonsense as usual for last night's opening episode of series 14 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Former Los Angeles Times crime reporter Michael Connelly struck gold with his books about LAPD detective Harry Bosch, before pulling a deft gear-change with the creation of criminal defence attorney Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer. The movie version, directed by Brad Furman and scripted by film and TV veteran John Romano, sticks pretty close to Connelly's novel, even if Matthew McConaughey's lead character has mysteriously morphed from Mickey to Mick.Though rooted in a familiar low-life Los Angeles peopled by surly cops, hookers, petty criminals and irascible prosecutors, the film lifts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
By the trail of dead shall ye know Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, who bounces back irascibly for a ninth and final series of Waking the Dead. For once, British TV has the edge over its American counterpart. While Jerry Bruckheimer's US series, Cold Case, always feels dragged backwards by its clunking reconstructions of ancient crimes (especially the device of using young actors to impersonate now-elderly perps in their prime), Waking the Dead manages to catapult its back-catalogue felonies vividly into the present.The unsolved mystery in this first two-part episode, Harbinger, dated Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The animals 17-year-old Josh Cody has to survive are his own criminal family. The Codys are hardly the Corleones. Led by sweetly smiling, grandmotherly matriarch Smurf (Jacki Weaver) as they fume and feud in Melbourne’s suburbs, this motley gang of five’s only outstanding quality is their ruthlessness. Deposited with them when his mum overdoses on drugs, the shy teenager navigates between armed robber Uncle Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) and wired drug dealer Uncle Craig (Sullivan Stapleton). Senior detective Leckie (a moustached, understated Guy Pearce) would also like a word, as Josh tries to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The legal drama has become a staple of stage and screen, for a variety of excellent reasons. All of human life really is there, from love and hate to good and evil, crammed into the claustrophobic cockpit of the courtroom. Adding an extra squirt of kerosene to an already explosive mix is the fact that, as Dr Gregory House likes to say, “Everybody lies.”The latest cab on the telly-lawyer rank is Silk, BBC One’s sizzling new six-parter from Peter Moffat. A former barrister himself, Moffat has carved out a prestigious legally orientated screenwriting career, which has taken him from Kavanagh Read more ...