crime
Adam Sweeting
"We've got a product a fella's got to have," decreed Nucky Thompson, the County Treasurer in Atlantic City the day Prohibition came into force. "Better still, we've got a product he's not allowed to have."For Nucky and his cronies running the garish New Jersey resort, with a brazen criminality that makes our homegrown likes of T Dan Smith look like laughable amateurs in the art of graft, Prohibition was the best business opportunity they were ever going to have. They'd taken judicious steps to guarantee supplies of illegal liquor, either distilled or imported, and now they could add on a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's here! HBO's Boardwalk Empire finally arrived last night, the big news on the opening day of the new Sky Atlantic channel. Already staggering under a burden of Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild awards, Boardwalk looks likely to enjoy a long and glittering career, with a second series already in production.With a $20m budget and Martin Scorsese in the director's chair, the pilot episode has been hailed as a TV milestone. The garishness and grotesquerie of Atlantic City at the start of the Prohibition era is vividly rendered, with its chorus girls, freak shows and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the jewel in Sky Atlantic's crown is the award-guzzling Boardwalk Empire, great things are also expected of its new cop-opera Blue Bloods, judging by the number of trailers spattering the Sky networks. It's the Dynasty of law enforcement, chronicling the relationships and travails of the Reagan family of New York.Whether the family name was intended to convey any kind of political resonance is a matter for conjecture, though it serves well enough for a multi-generational family of Big Apple police officers of Irish descent. Actually, they're not quite all police officers – the various Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the mythic status of the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thirty years after the original series came to the end of its 12-year history, Hawaii Five-0 is about to burst back onto British TV. The new-look Five-0 kicked off in September last year on the American CBS network, and will debut on Sky1/Sky1 HD in the UK in February.A pilot for a new Hawaii Five-0 was made in 1996, starring Gary Busey and Russell Wong, but it never aired. This time, the chemistry feels right and American audiences have been enthusiastic. The new version uses several of the same principal character names from the original, including of course Steve McGarrett (originally Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s not so much the children of mad celebs I feel sorry for as their animals. The private zoo stuffed with exotic, non-indigenous wildlife is a sure sign of money, power and hubris run riot. The tigers and chimps at the Neverland ranch became powerful symbols of Michael Jackson’s dislocation. Similarly, last night's Storyville told how an abandoned brood of pet hippos have come to define the worst excesses of the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.Escobar was not a conventional star, but he enjoyed all the trappings of celebrity: wealth, glamour, infamy. He was hailed as a hero at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Notwithstanding his regrettable central role in the recent remake of Bouquet of Barbed Wire, Trevor Eve is an actor who has improved vastly with age. Once cursed with a kind of shiny smugness, the 21st-century Eve is rougher round the edges and indelibly lined with decades of thespian rough'n'tumble. Best of all, he now exhibits a hard, lethal streak, painstakingly honed by a decade of digging up mouldering corpses in Waking the Dead.In the first part of ITV's new three-parter, Kidnap and Ransom, Eve (who's an executive producer on the project) stepped into the expensive shoes of hostage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The real-life story behind Conviction had a big balloon over its head saying “Hollywood screenplay!!!”, and sure enough here’s director Tony Goldwyn’s big-screen version, with Hilary Swank striding out front carrying the banner for truth, justice and the supernatural properties of sibling devotion. There’s no denying it’s an incredible story.Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a working-class woman from rural Massachusetts (a region depicted here as startlingly primitive and impoverished) who shared an unusually close bond with her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after the pair of them had endured a Read more ...
fisun.guner
What’s with the two titles? A crime drama so good that they had to name it twice? Or couldn’t anyone in production decide which one to ditch? Why not swap them around, or maybe call it "Prime Suspect", or "Prime Suspect: Deadly Intent", or variations thereof? (OK, perhaps not "Prime Suspect: Above Suspicion", which would kind of cancel the other one out, but you get my drift.) Indeed, Lynda La Plante’s titles are so irritatingly, meaninglessly generic that they’d fit just about any old plot with a vaguely criminal theme. But then, her plots are generic, so I suppose as long as they’ve got Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There must be good reasons why the fine crime novels of Michael Dibdin have been absent from screens large and small. They're probably to do with Dibdin's deadpan satirical tone and the anti-heroic nature of his protagonist, the Venetian detective Aurelio Zen. Also, his shrewd observations of the hidden undercurrents of Italian society are almost bound to get lost in screen translation. "Books and movies are completely different media", Dibdin once commented, "and the more the Hollywood crowd learns to knit their own stuff, the better."So, it's pleasing - perhaps even slightly miraculous - to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.Having concluded our Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If there’s one thing the British love on television at Christmas time, it’s a period drama, and even better, a period mystery. So what joy when there’s a bit of sleuthing by Agatha Christie's yin to Hercule Poirot’s yang, the eagle-eyed wise old bird Miss Marple, in The Secret of Chimneys.Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) is asked by Lady Virginia Revel (Charlotte Salt), the daughter of a dead cousin (what a lot of those the old girl appears to have), to be part of a lavish weekend party at the family’s country pile, Chimneys. The house was once known for its society gatherings until a rare Read more ...