crime
Adam Sweeting
This is the first of two new TV series this week to feature a female police officer investigating the discovery of long-buried skeletons (the other one is Thursday's Unforgotten on ITV). The two shows are different in tone, but still reminiscent of numerous noir-ish policiers of recent vintage. It makes you wonder whether commissioning editors are trying hard enough. We hear a lot of earnest talk about "diversity", but it doesn't seem to apply to themes and subject matter.Anyway, From Darkness stars Anne-Marie Duff as Claire Church, a former Manchester police officer who became demoralised by Read more ...
David Nice
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. A fuller picture of Shostakovich’s murdering heroine as 20th - or even 21st - century Russian woman couldn’t be imagined; soprano Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead? Writer-director Brian Helgeland knows his way around screen violence - he scripted LA Confidential – and he has been a tourist in England before: he paid a knockabout visit to the Middle Ages with A Knight’s Tale. The traditional thing to say about foreign directors on such Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Breezy” isn't a word we associate with Ray Winstone. We’re more used to something like “big slab o’ bastard”, the epithet he got (they were biased Glaswegians, admittedly) most recently for his appearance in Robert Carlyle’s The Legend of Barney Thomson.So to see him jauntily singing along to Sinatra at the beginning of Alan Whiting’s three-parter The Trials of Jimmy Rose looked different. Admittedly he was walking away from 12 years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (not his first stretch, either), and being met in a Bentley suggested that probation wasn’t exactly going to be a hardship stint. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This ain't the Summer of Love," sang Blue Oyster Cult in 1975. Judging by this intriguing new drama, it might not really have been the Summer of Love in 1967 either, as David Duchovny's Detective Sam Hodiak picks his way through the dope and the kaftans and finds himself on the trail of a menacing little scumbag called Charlie Manson.Looking older and chunkier, but also sleek and a trifle sleazy, Duchovny slips into the role of an LAPD veteran with a knowing shrug. Though the young undercover narcotics cop he ends up working with, Brian Shafe (Grey Damon, pictured below right), starts off Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Marshland is set on possibly the last section of the Andalusian coastline which doesn’t have high-rise condos planted all over it. Imagine the Kentish marshes of Great Expectations, but with a harsh sun cracking the parched earth, while overhead the sky throngs with geese and flamingos. It’s in this inhospitable corner of Spain that young women keep disappearing, apparently lured away to the big city, never to be heard from again.Two detectives team up to investigate the disappearance of a pair of sisters. Both policemen wear extravagant moustaches, for this is 1980, with Francoism a recent Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Poirot curls an eyebrow and Miss Marple twinkles, but there haven't been a lot of out-and-out laughs in Agatha Christie’s television career. Partners in Crime comes as a pleasurable surprise. It stars David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a married couple on their uppers who take up detective work almost by accident.The Beresfords had a long career: Christie wrote the first novel to feature them in 1922 and the fourth in 1973. There were also some short stories collected as Partners in Crime, each a spoof of other crime writers including Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Its title may hint at exotic worlds – a Western, even – but Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is anything but. Carlyle himself plays the title character, one of life’s losers (“haunted tree” being one of the more memorable descriptions we get of him) who’s barely getting by as a Glasgow barber until the story, and his own unplanned actions, pitch his mundane existence to another level altogether.But from the hangdog humour of Barney’s opening overvoice narration onwards, it’s clear this is no bleak drama of existential deprivation, even if Scottish writer Douglas Lindsay’s source novel The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Shall we blame The Bridge? The Swedish-Danish cop show opened for business with a scenario of outlandish gruesomeness: two halves of two corpses straddling the border between two countries. How to grab the viewer by the lapels, lesson one: hook them with a crazy, wacky, weird murder scene, so bonkers they’ll just have to hang around to find out what’s what.Witnesses is reading the same playbook. We began with three bodies strewn around a show home, and it was swiftly revealed that these bodies had nothing to do with one another and had been dug up from a variety of cemeteries. Precisely how Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The best that can be said of The Face of an Angel is that it’s based around an interesting idea. Instead of dramatising the story of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia and what surrounded the case, director Michael Winterbottom has instead fashioned a film in which serial director of flop films Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) has arrived in Siena to scope out how to adapt a book on the case, then in its court appeal phase, by American journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale). For the purposes of The Face of an Angel, Kercher has been renamed Elizabeth Pryce, the accused and Read more ...
Simon Munk
If the interface is simple, the story it gradually reveals is anything but. Her Story is an absolutely stunning piece of interactive storytelling, taking in murder, identity, history, yet driven simply by you typing a word or two into a search bar. You're presented with a beautifully rendered and retro computer screen – the kind of thing you'd expect to see coppers in The Bill tapping into. You simply decide what "search term(s)" you want, then hit go, and in return you get videos.When the game starts, the search term is "murder" and you have access to the first five videos returned, of many Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Truth isn't so much stranger than fiction as it is duller. That, at least, is the abiding impression left by True Story, the debut film from the adventuresome theatre director Rupert Goold that by rights ought to be considerably more exciting than it is. Bringing together Jonah Hill and James Franco in a cat-and-mouse game that begins when one appropriates the identity of the other, the result pounds away at its thesis about how similar these apparent adversaries are without extracting much meat from their encounters. The rewards come largely from watching Hill further his expanding Read more ...