crime
Tom Baily
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence. Director Zackary Adler perhaps aimed for contrast, maybe even balance, with this ill foray into the hit job thriller, but he’s ended up with confusion and lifelessness.Sinister veteran killer Ezekiel Mannings (Gary Oldman) faces trial and has planned to kill the only living witness to his crimes before the testimony is given. A motorbiked hitwoman, aka “the courier 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 ...
Graham Fuller
“Badass” – as applied to dynamic women – and “girl power” may be the kinds of exhausted clichés that are reductive in the #MeToo and Time’s Up era, but the new Charlie’s Angels movie revitalises the attitude they describe in a way that’s neither condescending nor retrogressive. Hunger Games actor Elizabeth Banks’s second feature as a director, and the first she’s written, is a pleasurably larky action rollercoaster that makes the most of its lowballed feminism. The three crime-busting warriors this time work for the European branch of the LA-based Charles Townsend Detective Agency. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The world’s most successful mystery writer is found dead on the morning after his 85th birthday. In attendance in his Gothic pile are his bickering family, each of whom might wish him dead, and a colourful detective ready to determine whodunnit. We’ve been here before, of course. The good news is that writer/director Rian Johnson’s homage to the Agatha Christie style murder mystery is no dutiful but dull period carbon copy, but a gloriously entertaining, modern-day riff. Poirot and Miss Marple were never as much fun as this. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is a Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Some two million Americans are currently in prison in America. A disproportionate number are black and nearly 200,000 are estimated to be innocent. John Grisham’s quietly horrifying new novel is a damning indictment of the inequities and corruption of the American legal system, which is shown to be not only corrupt but also profoundly inefficient and adept at making victims of those it incarcerates.Over two decades before the story begins, in the small Florida town of Seabrook, a young white lawyer named Keith Russo was shot dead while working alone at his desk late into the night. There were Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Talking cures and exploring the darkness of men’s souls – are you sure this is a career for a gentleman?” This is Vienna, 1906. Freud is exerting an influence, to the disapproval of many, including the father of cool-as-a-cucumber Max Liebermann (Matthew Beard).Max, a British-Jewish doctor, is a Freud acolyte. He is also working in the neurology department of a Viennese hospital where electro-convulsive therapy is still the order of the day. “We don’t change our working practices every time some Jewish doctor publishes a book,” scoffs the hospital director (anti-Semitism lurks everywhere in Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
"Surreal" is how the man calling himself Nicholas Searle describes the last five years of his life. He began working on his debut novel The Good Liar in 2014 at the age of 57, having recently retired from the Civil Service. The nature of his former employment remains undisclosed. But, the fact that Nicholas Searle is not his real name, gives a clue to the fact his work was in intelligence rather than land registry. Early retirement gave him the opportunity to do something he has always wanted to do – write a novel.He had dabbled in writing but now “wanted to see whether I could or not”. It Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Much has been made of Martin Scorsese’s recent dismissal of Marvel films. Putting that debate aside, there’s no escaping the fact that in an era of rapid-fire sequels, with the same ensembles trotted out year after year, there’s far more frisson to be felt when the reunion is after not one or two, but 25 years – and what the filmmakers are seeking to recreate really is movie magic. That’s the case with this reteaming of Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who made a trio of classic films together – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the last, Casino, in 1995. 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 ...
Marina Vaizey
Ballard and Bosch sound like some dystopian upmarket commodity. They are, but deep in with the low life. They are Michael Connolly’s new duo of detectives, one in semi-disgrace, one retired. Throw in Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and you’ve got one of the most fascinating and satisfying series of crime novels out there. Throughout the 33 that Connelly has published since 1992, familiar characters turn up regularly. Interconnected webs of professional and personal acquaintances enrich the narratives. Back stories are lightly sketched, as needed. Readers are immersed not only in the varied 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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Well here’s an interesting one. We’ve been up to our eyebrows in Eurocops for the past few years, but this Anglo-Japanese fusion from BBC Two (the title translates as "Duty / Shame") feels strikingly fresh and different.It began, as policiers are inclined to do, with an untimely death. We saw a smartly-dressed Japanese man in a ferociously modern London apartment, pouring out a couple of whiskies. Somebody called on the entryphone. In the flash of an edit, he was a corpse on the carpet with a sword buried in his back, surrounded by CSIs in masks and white overalls, dusting for clues. Read more ...