thrillers
Tom Birchenough
It’s not the first time that James Norton has kicked off BBC One’s New Year primetime celebrations in Russian style. Two years ago, he was costumed up as the courageous Prince Andrei, in illustrious ensemble company for Andrew Davies and Tom Harper’s War and Peace. To say that Norton’s central role in McMafia, the new eight-parter created by Hossein Amini and James Watkins (who directs the full series), comes with rather more moral ambiguity would be an understatement.If Tolstoy measured human probity in living right by God (and settling your gambling debts), the denizens of this particular “ Read more ...
Mark Kidel
A new box-set to relish, six French cinema classics by a cult director, along with a wealth of fascinating extras on a seventh DVD. The French film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville belongs to a class of his own: a precursor of the New Wave, an influence on Godard, Louis Malle and others, and a successor to French film noir directors such as Pierre Chenal and Edmond T Gréville.He is most celebrated for stylish thrillers in which archetypal gangsters and lawmen are pitted against each other in a complex duel that unfolds with the tragic predictability of classical Greek drama. These films are often Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Woman in White insists on being told and retold. Wilkie Collins’s much loved thriller is perhaps the most widely and frequently adapted of all the great Victorian novels. In Marian Halcombe it has a resourceful heroine whose appeal doesn't rest remotely in her looks, and in Count Fosco with his menagerie of sinister pets it has an impeccably flavoursome villain. No wonder the BBC is unleashing yet another television version, while the Charing Cross Theatre has revived Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 2004 musical in a newly stripped-down version.A first theatrical version found its way onto the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.But then Murphy takes the boy home to meet his ophthalmologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children. And before long the earlier assumption is turned on its head. In fact, Martin Read more ...
Saskia Baron
To quote the genius sax player Dexter Gordon, "In nuclear war, all men are cremated equal" – or in this case, all adorable couples will burn as one. Anthony Edwards plays Harry, a not-so-genius trombone player who one sunny afternoon in Los Angeles meets Julie (Mare Cunningham), a waitress enjoying her afternoon off. They flirt amid the remains of extinct animals once dug out of the prehistoric La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA. Harry makes a date for later, when Julie finishes her shift at an all-night diner, but he oversleeps and she gives up waiting for him.So far, so Eighties romcom. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Beware – here be spoilers, though if you can make them out through the blizzard of cliché that engulfed the last double-bill of this thunderingly underwhelming Nordic noir then you’re already ahead of me.Black Lake (BBC Four) saw a group of largely unlikable wealthy young people, led by the rude and overbearing Johan (Filip Berg, pictured below), stuck at a ski resort in the middle of nowhere with, wait for it: no phone signal, a pair of unlikely brothers (one of whom looks like a serial killer, while the other acts like one) and, best of all, a grumpy and deeply suspicious caretaker. After Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an intriguing combination of style and atmosphere in Berlin Syndrome, one that proves that, although director Cate Shortland has embraced genre with conviction, she certainly hasn’t left the arthouse roots that she established with her first two films, her debut Somersault and the much-acclaimed Lore from five years ago, behind. Whether the result finally and fully convinces may be another mattter, especially over a rather protracted length of nearly two hours, but it’s certainly a curious journey.It begins in laid-back mode, as we encounter heroine Clare (Teresa Palmer, intense) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What would Saturday nights be without BBC Four’s regular subtitle-fests? Black Lake, their new Swedish import, has nothing in the way of originality to recommend it, but its tale of a haunted ski resort somewhere out towards the Norwegian border may help to ward off seasonal ennui as temperatures fall and the evenings draw in. The story so far: Johan (Filip Berg), an impatient young capitalist, wants to buy the derelict resort of Svartsjön, and gathers together a bunch of his buddies go and check the place out. Initially it seems like the kind of experience the average Brit Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike. He has literally changed the landscape of thrillers and spy fiction, criticising bureaucracies, governments and corporations and other even broader sweeps of society along the way, turning genre into trenchant and critical observations about the post-war world. Along the way he has created fictional characters so well observed they live in the mind long after 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 ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be winning audiences in a big way. He’s the creation, of course, of JK Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith – the author’s chosen anonymity lasted barely three months – and her debut in crime writing is now a satisfyingly stylish BBC adaptation. Following on directly from these three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling come two based on its sequel, The 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 ...