crime
Adam Sweeting
I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's Day of the Triffids at New Year, and he's better still in this four-part gangster drama set in Manchester's terrifying criminal underworld.Scott plays Michael O'Connor, a former Manc crime lord of epic notoriety, now trying to live a new life and start a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We’ll never feel the real impact - an all too apposite word - of the violence in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, given that it has dominated pre-release publicity for the film. The suspense of waiting for it will surely distract viewers from any suspense that the director was trying to create naturally through the formal build-up of unease within the plot and environment he’s taken on from Jim Thompson’s noir novel.If that leaves Winterbottom somewhat hoisted by his own petard, the director more than makes up for it with his immaculate control of a movie dominated by the ( Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
After the final episode of The Prisoner was aired in February 1968, Patrick McGoohan had to go into hiding after being besieged at home by viewers demanding an explanation about his teasingly obscure (and, I think, rather brilliant) ending. It’s unlikely that Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah will have similar problems after last night’s send-off to Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - after all, these days you can delve into the limitless speculation of the internet to compare their interpretations, maybe even read Graham and Pharoah’s Tweets on the matter.And, anyway, the creators of BBC One’s Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Werner Herzog is your go-to guy if you want a film about extraordinary madness. The German director's legendary partnership with Klaus Kinski yielded such wild and wonderful monuments to insanity as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Theirs would be the natural team for this tale of a cop run amok, but, Kinski having departed to that great padded cell in the sky, Herzog hooks up instead with Nicolas Cage. The result is a slickly amusing, facetious study in dementia that declares its weirdness loud and proud without straying anywhere close to the edge of its comfort zone.Cage plays Read more ...
josh.spero
American television network executives more concerned about remaking old dramas (Rockford Files 2010, anyone?) than maintaining a powerhouse drama which has wowed critics and fans for 20 years have finally killed off Law & Order. Custom has not staled the infinite variety of Dick Wolf's show, which has been kept fresh by revolving casts. Stalwarts have included Jerry Orbach, S Epatha Merkerson and Sam Waterston, while Jeremy Sisto, Chris Noth (of Sex and the City fame), Angie Harmon and Carey Lowell have been among the young turks. L&O is no ordinary 'tec show; for a start, it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Idris Elba’s screen career is going so swimmingly that you wonder what can have tempted him back to Blighty. Probably not the weather, since the former denizen of Canning Town now lives in Florida, and is in perpetual demand Stateside thanks to the extreme hotness engendered by his portrayal of Russell “Stringer” Bell in The Wire. He was in the American version of The Office, co-starred with Beyoncé in Obsessed, has several movies in production and will executive-produce a new legal drama series for NBC.So, Idris Elba, where did it all go wrong? I jest, of course. Slightly. Luther is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The opening episode of a new series is always an awkward blighter. You have to introduce the characters and establish the required tone, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the thing moving. Even mega-budget epics like FlashForward have struggled to make it work.And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Teenagers David and Emily are inseparable friends, who live year-round on a crummy seaside caravan park on the East Anglian coast. They play games of chase among the caravans, scare sheep in surrounding fields and steal from the sweet shop on site. The friends, although the same age, are at different stages of their development; he still looks boyish, she is already flirting with Steve, the much older security guard on site. But the pair are equally emotionally inarticulate and struggling to understand their nascent lust; as the increasingly dark story unfolds, we understand that The Read more ...
theartsdesk
Two films with a East European flavour, Katalin Varga and Tales from the Golden Age, are among our March selection, which also includes the lovely, bittersweet Irish drama Kisses. Our US release (available worldwide, of course, by mail-order) is Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas with succulent extras. Alastair Sim stars in Guy Hamilton's 1954 film of An Inspector Calls, while the late Edward Woodward lives on in the Callan box-set. The footballer-producers Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand score a resplendent own goal in our stinker, Dead Man Running.Films we have covered previously, including Fantastic Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It's common to feel a real sense of doom when you approach the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre. But it’s not the dodgy hoodies that turn your legs to jelly, it’s the sheer ugliness of the architecture. Yes, aesthetically, this is urban hell. But it’s also the site of the Royal Court’s Local project, in which a rundown shop unit has been turned into a makeshift theatre. Random, a spirited revival of Debbie Tucker Green’s 2008 play, is the first of a season of edgy dramas to make the trek from Sloane Square to Southwark.Outside, a chilly wind; inside a quick frisk by a bouncer, and you’re Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.It’ll be curious to see if the planned Hollywood version Read more ...