crime
Mark Sanderson
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Miles, a henchman for a gloriously nasty casino owner called Amara de Escalones (Lidia Porto, pictured below) in Pahrump, Nevada, knows this full well – he spends his days collecting kickbacks and crushing corpses in a car-compactor – but chooses to ignore it as he dreams of escaping his scuzzy existence and making it in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.Hidden (or Craith in Welsh) stems from the same BBC Cymru Wales/S4C provenance as Hinterland, with whom it also shares the executive-producing fingerprints of Mark Andrew and Ed Talfan. Likewise, it echoes the eeriness and sense of isolation of its predecessor, exploiting spectacular but melancholy Snowdonia scenery to evoke a steady undertone of dread and horrors hidden in the undergrowth.There had to be a corpse to kick Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Regular air travel is a hassle. All that queuing, all that security, all those hot halls, and then the endless waiting, the bawling kids and the limited legroom. Basically air travel sucks. But at least it’s reasonably safe. The same cannot be said for irregular air travel: stowaways who slip into the wheel wells of planes. Some 96 people have tried this way of avoiding border checks – and most have died. This new play by Fiona Doyle, who won the playwriting Papatango Prize in 2014, was inspired by one such case, that of Jose Matada, who died in 2012. Her play was shortlisted for the Susan Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Right from the beginning of Simon Evans’s production of Tracy Letts's 1993 play, it’s clear we’re in for an intense, raw experience. A storm of almost symphonic musical accompaniment roars, lightning flashing over the claustrophobic trailer interior where the tight two hours-plus run of Killer Joe will play out.Star billing here, of course, goes to Orlando Bloom, who's back on the West End stage after a decade away, in the title role as the corrupt cop who doubles as a hitman. But Grace Smart’s set deserves no less of a round of applause (main picture): it takes over the compact space of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“He’s not a sideshow attraction,” we hear towards the end of Marc Meyers’s queasily compelling My Friend Dahmer, when one of the “Dahmer Fan Club”, a group of high school sham-friends-cum-taunters who have been treating the film’s teen protagonist as if he was just that, has second thoughts. Encouraging him to throw pretend fits – they call it “spazzing” – first around school, later in public, they have seen it as some sort of “cool” provocation, a hilarious disruption. The bullied outsider Jeff appears content to go along with it, gratified by the semblance of inclusion that it seems to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Addressing the baying media on the steps of the courthouse after being acquitted of murdering his wife, for which non-crime he’d spent the last seven years in prison, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) was a bitter and angry man. He wanted to expose the people who’d fitted him up, he wanted his children back, and he aimed to find out who really killed his wife Tara.Three episodes in, he’s been doing pretty well with his personal checklist. We know for sure that he’s innocent, he’s been remarkably successful in building bridges with his children (especially his son Jack), he’s found a sympathetic ear Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the 1990s, which brought us Morse, Fitz and Jane Tennison, an idea took root that all television detectives must be mavericks. They needed to be moody, dysfunctional, addictive, a bit of an unsolved riddle. These British sleuths were all variations on a glum theme but the scriptwriters knew the limits. Make them suffer, but don’t put them through hell. Then came Nordic noir, which actively pursued a policy of mentally torturing its protagonists. The Killing deprived Sarah Lund of an ability to form close bonds, and eventually evicted her from her own life. With every new series The Bridge Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Though set in a futuristic (although not by much) world in which information technology has almost taken over the human psyche, Anon still relies on a crumpled whisky-drinking gumshoe for its protagonist. In this case, the relict of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe is detective Sal Frieland, played by Clive Owen with his habitual air of laconic disappointment. If anything good should happen in Sal’s world, he knows it won’t last.Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, auteur of sci-fi classic Gattaca and screenwriter of The Truman Show, Anon decants us into an identikit North American city – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the late 1970s the British establishment sustained a bloody nose. Roland Huntford published his debunking of Captain Scott and Anthony Blunt was outed as the Fourth Man, while the Old Etonian Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for conspiracy to murder. That last story will be told in A Very English Scandal later this month, but in the meantime BBC Four has exhumed Law and Order, the television drama which lifted a lid on corruption in the police and the law.The Home Office got very hot under the collar about this insurrectionary assault on police probity when it was broadcast. Read more ...
graham.rickson
The story behind the making of first-time director Mitu Misra’s Lies We Tell is often easier to make sense of than what happens in the film: Misra realised the project with money from his double-glazing business and plenty of bull-headed persistence. Its various disparate elements don’t all co-exist happily, notably a phoned-in cameo from Harvey Keitel as ageing businessman Demi.Despite Keitel’s top billing, his character dies within the first two minutes, the video evidence of his extra-curricular activities the MacGuffin which propels the story. Get past the risible opening sequence (yes, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to grasp in your imagination, never mind filming it and putting it on TV. In China Miéville’s source novel, dramatised here by Tony Grisoni, the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Quoma exist side by side, and in some areas even overlap. However, citizens of either city are forbidden to see each other and must learn to “unsee” people, buildings or objects from the opposing one. Failure to do so risks triggering an intervention by the ruthless cross-border police force called Breach. “Breach” also seems to be used as a collective noun to describe people making illegal trips across the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ordeal by Innocence belongs to a new and, you hope, short-lived sub-genre. The only other stablemate is All the Money in the World. Both were in the can and good to go when very serious sexual allegations were made against a member of the cast. For the latter, Ridley Scott reshot every scene which featured Kevin Spacey, subbing in Christopher Plummer. For BBC One’s now annual serving of an Agatha Christie drama, everyone came back to redo the bits which previously contained Ed Westwick and now have Christian Cooke (pictured below). Fortunately most of these seem to be interiors, as the Read more ...