police
Jasper Rees
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a mystery. Now you see it on the cover of the Radio Times. Now it’s in mothballs. The beneficiary of this hasty swerve was Bancroft. Originally made for ITV Encore, a channel which is about to become an ex-channel, it has suddenly come in from the cold.What does it say about a drama that was to have been launched in a graveyard where thousands not Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Forget Christopher Eccleston and the Lake District. Two years on, Ed Whitmore’s ready-mix thriller Safe House returns with Stephen Moyer in Merseyside. He plays Tom Brook – not the venerable film critic (Talking Movies is still showing on BBC World), but an ex-cop convinced his successors are making a dreadful mistake.Eight years ago someone nicknamed The Crow abducted three women who were never found. Nevertheless, a man called Luke Griffin (Stephen Lord) was jailed for life for their murders. Now, in what appears to be a copycat crime, Julie (Lynsey McLaren), the lovely partner of Liverpool Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So who killed Cinnamon? Six weeks ago we saw the strangled sex-worker – packed in a pink suitcase – pushed into Bondi Bay. The finale of Top of the Lake: China Girl withheld enlightenment. Puss, the chief suspect, denied responsibility. Why would the baby-farmer destroy such a valuable (pregnant) asset? The couple that ran his brothel (the concubines were advertised as surrogate mothers) disposed of the body but perhaps an overexcited client did the actual deed. The only sure thing was that Cinnamon was still toast.Jane Campion’s drama – it was never a thriller – began uncertainly, showed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since the late 1980s, all of them featuring a lead female protagonist. She herself worked as a journalist and a crime reporter, and the atmosphere is grittily realistic.Insidious Intent is the tenth volume in the only McDermid series to feature a partnership – one both emotional, albeit reticent and repressed at times, and professional. Once again, as in all these novels, the title is a phrase from TS Eliot, here “The Love Song of J Albert Prufrock”: Streets that follow like a tedious Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. The Government Inspector. And still they flow onto the screen: only recently there’s been Damilola: Our Loved Boy, The Moorside and Little Boy Blue.Now Three Girls, in which over three nights on BBC One redemption was dealt out with extreme parsimony. You knew it was going to end complicatedly when the guilty Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Was it just a coincidence that budding serial killer Sam attended Ripley Heath High? Probably not. Born to Kill, written by Tracey Malone and Kate Ashfield, was keenly aware that it followed in the bloody footsteps of both real sociopaths such as Harold Shipman and fictional ones such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. And what a dance it led us!Over the past four weeks on Channel 4 we have seen the schoolboy move from the edge of things – a diving board, a wooded hollow where he hid his trophy tin, a birthday party for his only friend’s father – to the centre of a full-blown psychotic Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So here’s the thing: a heavily pregnant woman is hanging by her ankles above a raging torrent. Two teens, one with a broken arm, are stuck down a well. And 15 miners, deep below ground, take refuge from a fire in an emergency chamber, unaware it has been sabotaged by the serial killer among them, who then, using “a gadget”, proceeds to switch off the mine’s pumps so they will all slowly drown.It seems Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – whose baby Midnight Sun (Sky Atlantic) is – have long had water on the brain. Eight weeks ago, when their Franco-Swedish thriller began with a man in a suit tied Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cop a load of that, then. Hana Reznikova is serving time for triple murder. Ted Hastings is on permanent gardening leave. The Huntleys have renewed their wedding vows on a family trip to Disneyworld. Just kidding. This is a Reg 15 alert to advise you that the following paragraphs contain almost nothing but spoilers.So what happened in the dense, pulsating finale to series four of Line of Duty, its first on BBC One? “It’s complicated,” DCI Roz Huntley told her grouchy kids. It certainly was. Ever since her eyes pinged open at the end of episode one, we’ve been waiting for Huntley to navigate a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Within seconds – literally seconds – of Unforgettable it becomes apparent that this is the kind of film that in the late Eighties and Nineties used to be referred to as “straight to video”, a label that covered a plethora of trashy, sexist, by-the-numbers psycho and erotic thrillers that beat a hasty route to Blockbuster. To actually see one in the cinema, released by a major studio, is a disconcerting experience.Those first few salacious and silly seconds involve the police interrogation of a woman, who looks like the victim of an almighty beating but is actually facing a murder rap. Julia Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An Egyptian/French co-production directed by Egyptian film-maker Mohamed Diab, Clash is a fevered, chaotic attempt to portray some of the tangled undercurrents that fuelled Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and its subsequent unravelling. Knowing something about the toppling of the Mubarak regime in 2011, the ensuing election of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi and then his overthrow by the Egyptian army would help, but the film successfully speaks for itself as a cri de coeur for a nation in crisis.Obviously not awash in production funding, Diab conceived the ingenious notion of setting his Read more ...
David Benedict
“Take your pick. Who shall we talk to first?” DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and DS Miller (Olivia Colman) had their three prime suspects waiting for them in custody. The fact that none of them proved to be the guilty party was what was wrong not only with their investigation but with the construction of the third and final series of the dramatically serious, but seriously uneven, Broadchurch (ITV).On the absolute plus side was the handling of the subject matter. Following extensive consultation and research with women’s organisations and other bodies working in the area of rape, the Read more ...