crime
Blu-ray: Reservoir DogsTuesday, 17 January 2023
Quentin Tarantino’s is the first voice you hear in Reservoir Dogs (1992), riffing on Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. The gang of fellow robbers we see gathered round his character all talk like versions of the obsessive ex-video store clerk at times... Read more... |
Happy Valley, Series 3, BBC One review - tension mounts as the Yorkshire crime drama approaches its conclusionMonday, 16 January 2023
In this glittering era of global streaming, the viewer is constantly bombarded with the latest and most sensational TV drama from South Korea, Australia, Denmark, California etcetera. But Huddersfield’s own Sally Wainwright continues to show most of... Read more... |
The Pale Blue Eye review - telltale heartsTuesday, 27 December 2022
Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is the... Read more... |
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery review - grand, class-conscious escapismSunday, 27 November 2022
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel is an even more brightly entertaining puzzle picture, revelling in the old-fashioned glamour of enviably sunny climes and another rogues’ gallery of piquantly deployed film stars. Self-styled world’s greatest... Read more... |
Shetland, Series 7, BBC One review - Douglas Henshall is back for the last time as Jimmy PerezFriday, 12 August 2022
The last couple of series of Shetland (BBC One) brought the previously much-loved series alarmingly close to shark-jumping territory, converting the remote and thinly-populated Shetland archipelago into a war zone teeming with people-trafficking... Read more... |
Murder in Provence, ITV review - a little light sleuthing amid fabulous French sceneryTuesday, 02 August 2022
Connoisseurs of the Britbox streaming service may already have caught up with this three-part series, which has evidently been pressed into service on ITV to pad out TV’s annual summer slump. They could have called it Midsomer Murders Goes to the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Get CarterTuesday, 26 July 2022
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le... Read more... |
Trom, BBC Four review - there's something fishy in the North AtlanticSunday, 17 July 2022
In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s... Read more... |
Suspect, Channel 4 review - a stylised remake of a Danish psychological dramaMonday, 20 June 2022
Suspect has a simple premise: a detective goes on a routine visit to a mortuary where an unidentified young woman has been taken after being found hanged. Suicide is the initial judgment: the cop, Danny Frater (James Nesbitt), grills the pathologist... Read more... |
We Own This City, Sky Atlantic review - 'The Wire' creator David Simon is back on the Baltimore beatThursday, 09 June 2022
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO... Read more... |
Ozark, Series 4 Part 2, Netflix review - crumbling consciences and a last standMonday, 16 May 2022
As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Henry: Portrait of a Serial KillerSunday, 15 May 2022
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the... Read more... |
