crime
alexandra.coghlan
Welcome to Charlestown, a Boston neighbourhood of just one square mile that has produced more bank robbers than anywhere else in America. Here crime is a “trade” passed down from father to son, and the height of ambition is to serve your inevitable jail time “like a man”. It’s a setting grubbily familiar from the cinematic likes of Mystic River and The Departed, as well as Ben Affleck’s own directorial debut Gone Baby Gone; now it plays host to his sophomore effort The Town, a heist drama with a heart.Sadly, for all its macho posturing and gun-toting promise, The Town turns out to be as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jerry Bruckheimer’s production stable has already given us a lifetime’s supply of law-enforcement stories. The hydra-headed CSI franchise has become more ubiquitous than I Love Lucy in its heyday, while Cold Case and the FBI missing-persons yarns of Without a Trace are probably showing on a set near you whether you’re in Saigon or Santiago. Now here’s Jerry’s latest brainchild, Dark Blue, the saga of a crew of undercover Los Angeles cops led by Lieutenant Carter Shaw (Dylan McDermott).Since this is a Bruckheimer product, you might assume you weren’t about to be plunged too deeply into the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.Day 1: The Beauty Contest
The Miss Bangui beauty contest takes place at the Palais de l'Assemblée, an edifice built by North Koreans, where the Central African Republic's parliament used to meet. Since democracy was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As a journalist with a sense of pride about what we reptiles can achieve, sometimes I shudder at the awfulness of what passes for journalism. The licence fee in theory confers on the BBC some moral purpose higher than that of the base commercial stations, doesn’t it? (Given that it implies Commercial = Bad, Public Service = Good.) So a BBC Three documentary on shoplifting should probably be an example of higher journalism? Maybe something that rams home deeper truths either about the distinction between good and bad, or about disturbed individuals?Look, I know what BBC Three fare is. Just Read more ...
fisun.guner
After going on his murderous rampage earlier this summer, the police hunt for Raoul Moat was given rolling news coverage. Moat had critically injured his ex-partner Samantha Stobbart, he had murdered her new boyfriend and he had gone on to shoot and blind an off-duty policeman. Excerpts from the tapes he’d recorded over a two-year period, and those made during his subsequent week-long hide-out in the Northumbrian countryside, provided an audio backdrop to the story. But given that the case has been given so much coverage, given that relatives had already talked extensively to the press, and Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Lucy Punch – what a great name for a comedian (or a female boxer). Unfortunately that is the only thing that’s great about Vexed, a new comedy drama written by Howard Overman, creator of Channel 4’s perky ASBO (RIP) superpower fantasy Misfits. His new show is that relative rarity, a comedy cop show, a genre of which Punch has some experience, having had a supporting role in Hot Fuzz, although it’s not in Vexed’s interests to start making such comparisons.I mean, Vexed isn't vexatious; it trots along perfectly agreeably – there were no noticeable longueurs in last night’s opener – it’s just Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Well! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priuiledges wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first...” In 1623, the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works was collected by the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell. It cost a quid. Whenever they come on the market nowadays, editions tend to shift for rather more. Not so long ago I was allowed to leaf through the copy belonging to the Guildhall Library in the City of London. Valued at perhaps £2.5 million, it leaves the shelves only rarely. Whenever it does, it rests on a judiciously arranged beanbag. All who Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tired of the slick, pastiche world of the post-Lock, Stock... British crime movie? Then Down Terrace may be the address for you. Director Ben Wheatley’s micro-budget, naturalistic debut details the paranoid decline of a drug-dealing family in the back end of Brighton. They’re the Royle family with access to hand guns - a deadly and funny combination.Robin Hill (also editor, and co-writer with Wheatley) stars as Karl, with his screen dad Eric played by real dad Robert, whose terraced house is the main set. Both performers are excellent, as a fading patriarch who mixes menace and charm, and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was a risk that this new take on the indestructible sleuth of Baker Street might be smothered at birth by a dust-storm of pre-publicity, with coverage stretching from the tabloids to Andrew Marr (who really seems to believe he's an arts correspondent, and not just Alfred E Neuman's long-lost twin brother). Previewers couldn't help making comparisons between Benedict Cumberbatch's manic, omniscient Sherlock and the current Doctor Who, which I suppose was inevitable since Who writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are the brains behind Holmes, 2010-style.But after being dropped into the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Where can or will television’s thirst for tabloid anthropology fetch up? In previous tribal exchanges, wives have been swapped, geeks have gone to babe school, thugs to boot camp, WAGs to townships, Papua New Guineans to the big smoke. Posh girls have lately been parachuted into Peckham. Is there no social grouping so polarised that some bright spark at BBC Three or Channel 4 won’t want to thrust them into an alien environment for our voyeuristic pleasure? Porn stars to hang with the Taliban? It could yet happen. Lib Dems to lie down with Tories? Oh, they already did that.In the mean time, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The world isn’t exactly sending up distress flares urgently demanding more cop shows, but this new effort from ER’s producer John Wells proves that the genre can still be cranked into life if the writing is strong and the performances feel authentic. Catching the precise tone is always critical, and evidently some pushing and shoving went on about exactly where Southland should be pitched. Its original Stateside host, NBC, started it at 10pm, planned to air the second series at 9pm, then dropped the show altogether. TNT snapped it up and restored it to its 10pm slot, which has also been Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For the past decade or so, New York City has been bragging about its crime figures. Homicides are through the floor, whole fleets of firepower-toting cops are out there hassling hustlers, and the mean streets have been swept pretty much clean. I don’t think the creators of Brooklyn’s Finest can have got the press release. In their version of reality, the body count is off the chart as blood pumps, spurts and leaks from innumerable gunshot wounds, all of them faked up with a gleeful eye for detail. It reminds you of the end of The Duchess of Malfi, only it’s a gore bath all the way through.The Read more ...