crime
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 ...
Nick Hasted
Joy Division brought Anton Corbijn to England in 1979 and, nearly 30 years later, made him a cinema director. The sleeve of the band’s album Unknown Pleasures fascinated him so deeply he felt compelled to leave Holland for the country where such mysteries were made. The photographs he took of them for the NME helped make an icon of their singer Ian Curtis even before his 1980 suicide, and were themselves icons of a school of serious, black-and-white rock photography.Corbijn restlessly challenged himself to change styles through the 1990s, making rock videos as well as portraits. Finally, in Read more ...
neil.smith
It is not uncommon for opportunistic film-makers to put together a flashy promo in the hope it will attract enough investors to turn it into a full-length feature. When Robert Rodriguez made the Machete trailer for 2007 double-bill Grindhouse, though – an all-action spoof featuring striking bit-part actor Danny Trejo as its titular knife-wielding protagonist – he had no intention of taking this parodic in-joke any further.Watch the original Machete trailer:Three years on and countless fan entreaties later, Rodriguez has expanded that earlier gambit into a 104-minute opus whose “strong bloody Read more ...
carole.woddis
It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
David Suchet has been perfecting his impersonation of Hercule Poirot for more than 20 years, perhaps sympathising with Tina Turner’s maxim, “The longer I do it, the better it gets.” The way Suchet keeps finding new little tics and eccentricities to keep the character fresh is a substantial feat, since around him, the fixtures and fittings of Agatha Christie-land have proved impregnable to change.Hallowe'en Party was published in 1969, but this comfortably upholstered TV treatment (with a screenplay by Mark Gatiss, currently working 25/8) had cloaked itself in the leafy security of the Home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The American networks have so far been able to resist the stick-insectish charms of David Tennant, but the BBC would probably start up a new channel just for him if he asked them. In this new four-parter, his comeback appearance after handing over the keys of the TARDIS to Matt Smith, Tennant plays Dave Tyler, a successful Glasgow photographer married to teaching assistant Rita (Laura Fraser). They have a ramblingly large house full of kids and a dog, and live one of those exuberantly chaotic lives that only exist in TV drama, where domestic duties and hectic leisure activities magically co- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI franchises, and simultaneous home-grown and American versions of Law & Order squabbling for attention, but they just keep on coming.On Sunday night, Sky1 launches its much-trailed new series Thorne, adapted from Mark Billingham’s bestselling novels and starring David Morrissey as titular ‘tec Tom Thorne. He finds himself on the trail of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Howard Marks was a pothead Errol Flynn, living a life of remarkable escapades and hair's-breadth escapes. A Welsh working-class Oxford graduate in nuclear physics and philosophy, he’d be fascinating company even if he wasn’t once the world’s most successful dope smuggler, and an associate of the IRA, the CIA, the Mob and MI6. His autobiography, Mr Nice, has let Marks earn a living reminiscing about it ever since. But Bernard Rose’s adaptation casts inadvertent doubt on such cult heroism. Marks’s life here seems somehow inconsequential.Played by Rhys Ifans, he’s presented as an accidental Read more ...
howard.male
”The domestic” over at 27, The Hill turns out to be decidedly undomestic. The murderer's basement lair so resembles the blood-splattered dens of every other serial killer that has ever graced the big and small screen (right down to the sickly green light) that it’s hard not to contemplate the notion that there’s some kind of grim finishing school that all blossoming sadistic bastards are obliged to attend before getting their licence to kill.But while Morse would have snorted dismissively at the machete-inflicted carnage and suggested to Lewis that it was time for a pint, DCI Banks - taking Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Over there is the gang who give the movie its title (though it was originally going to be called Bone Deep), because they take stuff, mostly money. They’re a suave and dude-ish bunch, headed by Idris Elba exuding his usual intimidating air of authority as Gordon Betts, and Paul Walker as John Rahway, a kind of Sundance Kid in a suit. The gang are a bit like the Ocean’s Eleven crew, all hip, smart and stylish, though with an extra lethal edge, since director John Luessenhop has crammed the narrative with explosions, cacophonous gun battles and piles of bullet-flayed corpses.The movie opens Read more ...