crime
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 ...
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 ...