police
Veronica Lee
It's the smallest lies that can bring you down. When he is asked by a detective how he got on with his family, who have just been murdered in a mass shooting at their Essex farm, Jeremy Bamber (Freddie Fox) says: “Really well. We were friends.” A quizzical look briefly scutters across the face of his cousin Ann Eaton (Gemma Whelan) who overhears. As this six-part series unfolds, we will see that it was pointless mistruths like that that would help bring about Bamber's eventual undoing.It was one of many subtle moments of doubt dropped into ITV's White House Farm, which tells the story of how Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago. His film (as producer, writer, director and star) is an obvious labour of love, an evocative, entertaining, old-fashioned gumshoe noir, which fits snugly within the traditions of the genre while offering a refreshingly atypical hero.Forget Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes – sharply tailored, fast-talking, ineffably cool. Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a fledgling private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, who can’t help but fire off spontaneous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to a powerful cast and crisp direction from Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther), 21 Bridges drives home its story of good cops, bad cops and a Big Apple rotten to the core with bulldozing force. Centre stage is Chadwick Boseman as Andre Davis, a detective renowned for showing bad guys no mercy. His record of shooting an alarming tally of felons has earned him a grilling by Internal Affairs, but Cool Hand Andre insists every killing was justified. Like his ailing old mother tells him, “you got to look the devil in the eye.”The son of a dedicated policeman killed in the line of duty, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t expect a drama called Dublin Murders (BBC One) to be a laugh a minute, but the cumulative anguish, menace and torment of this eight-parter made it almost unbearable, even if viewers were thrown a tiny scrap of hope in the final frames. Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Phelps from Tana French’s novels In the Woods and The Likeness, it was (mostly) the story of detectives Cassie Maddox and Rob Reilly (Sarah Greene and Killian Scott, both consistently impressive) trying to solve the murder of aspiring young ballerina Katy Devlin while struggling with traumas from their own pasts.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Police corruption has fuelled many a Hollywood thriller, but sadly Black and Blue is no Training Day or The Departed. Naomie Harris plays US Army veteran turned rookie cop Alicia West, just three weeks into a career with the New Orleans police department, who to her horror stumbles across a murderous conspiracy among her fellow officers. The plot is basically her race against the odds to expose the bad guys before they bump her off.Harris’s character is difficult to take seriously, since despite her apparently gruelling military experiences in Kandahar, she’s astonishingly naive about life on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And welcome back to our favourite French cop show – perhaps our favourite cop show from anywhere, in fact – which has raced into its seventh series (on BBC Four) with some typically grimy storylines about death and lowlife in a very de-romanticised Paris. If you catch a glimpse of landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, it’s only in the far distance across drab expanses of rain-soaked rooftops. The action in Spiral is frequently shot with pavement-level actualité, as if it’s been hastily assembled from home-made documentary footage found in a discarded fast-food container.Last week’s opening episode Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If it wasn’t for bad luck, Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) wouldn’t have any luck at all. Being an Iraq special forces veteran jailed for protecting his wife in a bar fight seems wretched karma enough. Released as an undercover informant on the Polish mob for FBI handler Wilcox (Rosamund Pike), his bid to secure real freedom with his family is then kiboshed when a similarly clandestine New York cop is killed by his gangster partner.In return for such unwanted heat, both Polish kingpin the General (Eugene Lipinski) and Wilcox insist that Koslow re-enter his brutally corrupt alma mater, Bale Hill Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all grime's original generation, Kano has a strong claim to being the greatest rhyme-constructor in the old school hip hop sense of dense rhymes packed with multiple meanings. Add movie star looks and a penchant for fur coats in photoshoots and he was most young grime fans' tip for following Dizzee Rascal into the big league. But though he got the major label deal, MOBO awards, Mercury nominations and Damon Albarn collaborations, and though his 2016 Made in the Manor album hit the top ten, he's never quite parlayed that into becoming a breakout superstar, a household name in that Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
“You know twinkle toes, in another life I bet me and you could’ve done some serious damage.” When Jason Statham’s bad guy turned good finally warmed to Dwayne Johnson’s cartoon-like lawman in Fast & Furious 8, it could well have been a cue for this spin-off focussed on the two bickering beefcakes.It seems a smart call. Once the Fast & Furious franchise swapped its custom car testosterone and faux-Zen philosophy for more extravagant action and tongue-in-cheek banter, it became infinitely more enjoyable. And the rivalry between Statham’s Deckard Shaw and Johnson’s Luke Read more ...
Tom Baily
All is not well in Boston, Lincolnshire. Unemployment, immigration concerns, Brexit frustration, and the highest murder rate in the country. How do you solve the problems of contemporary Britain? Send in an American. And not just that. Bill Hixon (Rob Lowe) is the best: educated to Doctorate level, with the accolade of being America’s top Metropolitan police chief three years running. But Bill is also impatient, and lacks some basic people skills (not to mention he can’t grasp British irony and sarcasm). He’s also brought his teenage daughter Kelsey (Aloreia Spencer) with him. We gather that Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The porn was a bit disappointing, was it not? Dear old Ted, no longer romantically active, admitted to being a user. The Superintendent Hastings fanclub sighed for sorrow to witness him toss away his status as an essentially decent heartthrob for the Saga generation. Sorry for your loss, ladies. It was also disappointing because the high-risk act of wiping his laptop turned out to have such a bathetic explanation. The 50k lying around in a brown envelope he clearly deemed to have less pressing potential for embarrassment.At least now we know that Hastings is not H because - guess what? - no Read more ...