crime
Joseph Walsh
Like a sub-par Natural Born Killers for Gen Z, director-screenwriter Joshua Caldwell’s latest film, featuring Disney-child-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne, tackles the perils of social media like a parent trying to navigate TikTok. Arielle (Thorne) is a provocative Florida teen whose sole desire is to become famous any way she can. After a video of Arielle beating up a girl in a night club goes viral, she sees her road to stardom lies in making videos of violent acts to boost her online profile. Having dragged reluctant ex-con Dean (Jake Manley) along for the ride, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah shone a blinding light on the Camorra crime clans of Naples, and spun off an acclaimed film and equally admired TV series. This film version of his 2016 novel La paranza dei bambini (“The Children’s Gang”) isn’t in the same league as either of those, but its account of the way criminality is a kind of hereditary condition in some areas of Naples still packs a punch.Star of the show is 15-year-old Nicola (Francisco di Napoli), leader of one of the teenage gangs who scrap it out around town (the opening scene features a balletic fight in a shopping mall, with the Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
“All we want is to be seen and heard,” explains a lawyer to a death row inmate, paraphrasing a line from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from which Chinonye Chukwu’s new film Clemency takes inspiration.Chukwu’s film, like Ellison’s novel, explores the injustices faced by African Americans in the USA’s penal system. That reality is made all the sharper by the fact there are five decades that separate the novel from the film. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests around the world, the injustices that challenge us in Chukwu’s film cut Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
It’s hard to take The Old Guard seriously — it’s an action film about thousand-year-old immortal warriors. Pulpy flashbacks and fake blood abounds. But The Old Guard doesn’t need to be serious or even memorable: it’s a fun, feel-good film, a rare commodity these days.Andy (Charlize Theron) leads a band of renegades who use their immortality to thwart crime. Their secret power makes them outcasts, so their existence is increasingly threatened by surveillance and modern technology. A new immortal, Nile (KiKi Layne), joins their ranks at the exact moment that their freedom is most threatened. Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s taken over 18 years for Artemis Fowl to reach the big screen, with Miramax originally buying the rights in 2001. Finally, Disney have brought the world’s youngest criminal mastermind to life, but was it worth the wait? Well, the fact it’s appearing on streaming service Disney+ rather than waiting for a cinematic release probably answers that question.Loosely based on Eoin Colfer’s popular novels and helmed by Kenneth Branagh, 12-year-old Artemis Fowl II (Ferdia Shaw) must save his kidnapped father by infiltrating the secret society of fairies, dwarves and goblins. Alongside his bodyguard Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960) was Fritz Lang’s final film, resurrecting his Weimar villain in Cold War Berlin and forming a satisfying circle with his career’s German first half, which included Metropolis and M. This ended when Goebbels banned The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), leading to equally brilliant Hollywood exile, and the hard shadows of fierce classics from Fury to The Big Heat.Lang’s M star, Peter Lorre, ended his exile earlier with his sole film as director, The Lost One (1951), a searing parable of Nazi corruption, madness and murder which was too much for his homeland. Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
John Grisham is a brand, in the sense that the reader relies on some sense of what the product is going to be. He is well up in the millions of sales, along with other writers under the “thriller/mystery” umbrella – Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Ken Follett and Harlan Coben, to name but four. Still, as eagerly as his fans may await their yearly fix, he always manages to surprise.Scores of popular authors have had other professional lives which they mine for verisimilitude, and so with Grisham: a significant proportion of his novels (forty-four in all now) have made superbly imaginative Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since it debuted in November last year, Apple TV+ has barely made a dent in a market largely shaped by Netflix, but this eight-part adaptation of William Landay’s bestselling novel is a decisive step in the right direction. It’s a mixture of courtroom drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller, and if it sometimes falls back on familiar genre-ish cliches, the show can boast some fine performances and possesses the critical ingredient of watchability. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to know how it ends (and the TV version has a significantly different ending from the book).Casting Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has made a career crafting perceptive and cerebral examinations of his native country. From his 2006 debut 12:08 to Bucharest to The Treasure, they were cerebral films that powerfully embodied the Romanian New Wave. With his latest film The Whistlers, Porumboiu shows he’s capable of being both a brilliant filmmaker and playful at the same time. It’s an impish noir thriller, full of femme fatales, crooked cops and sun-drenched islands. We begin on the island of La Gomera, the pearl of the Canary Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Between 1972-1992 five series of Van der Valk were made for ITV, starring Barry Foster as the eponymous Amsterdam detective. Nearly 30 years later comes this reincarnation with Marc Warren in the title role, no doubt hoping to find a regular home in the juicy two-hour Sunday night slot.Does it work? Well… up to a point, though there’s still that air of artificiality that’s hard to overcome when you set a basically British cop show in a foreign city. Check Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander for further evidence. The recruitment of a sizeable squad of Dutch actors eases this somewhat (they may be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might consider equipping yourself with a shotgun and kevlar body armour before you start watching Gangs of London (Sky Atlantic), because this is a bruising, hair-raising ride. Created by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery, it began with the televisual equivalent of being thrown from a fast-moving vehicle, as we saw a terrified man dangling on a rope over the edge of a high-rise building. His captor then doused him in petrol and set fire to him, his blazing body eventually plummeting to the pavement far below.Deliberately or not, the effect of this double-length opener was like being engulfed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A camel is a horse designed by committee, they say; perhaps that explains why The Host, with several writing credits – adapted by Zachary Weckstein from a story by Laurence Lamers, screenplay by Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Lamers – doesn't really know what it is. Part suspense thriller, part crime caper, but mostly a Hitchcock rip-off (although I'm sure the creators would call it “homage”).It starts so promisingly, with Saul Bass-esque opening titles, but then we get into tale that becomes bogged down with trivial details. After being dumped by the married colleague with whom he has Read more ...