crime
Adam Sweeting
As Line of Duty aficionados debate the identity of H and wonder who DCI Joanne Davidson shares her DNA with, this new three-part series from BBC Two investigates the history of real-life corruption in the Metropolitan Police. Whereas the corrupt cops in Line of Duty seem to operate like a version of the Hydra terrorist organisation in the Marvel Comics universe, being ubiquitous and seemingly all-powerful, the real thing was shabbier and more squalid, but nonetheless widespread and brazenly, unrepentantly criminal.The story is vividly told through interviews and atmospherically grainy archive Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It’s no surprise that 30 years on, the individuals most closely connected to the world’s biggest art heist are showing their age. Anne Hawley was a young woman just months into her directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when thieves made off with 13 works of art, including a Chinese vase and drawings by Degas, a Vermeer and Rembrandt’s only seascape.Speaking to the press soon afterwards, Hawley (main picture) was visibly shellshocked, desperation and disbelief mingled painfully in her comment that “I have to operate under the assumption that we are going to get these Read more ...
graham.rickson
Silent Action makes for a snappier title than the original La polizia accusa: il Servizio Segreto uccide, though the frenzied action in Sergio Martino’s 1975 thriller is anything but silent. The film opens with the grisly murders of three Italian army officials, the third and bloodiest showing us the unconscious victim placed on a railway line and decapitated by an oncoming train. On the case is Luc Merenda’s improbably good-looking Inspector Solmi, all flowing locks and chiselled features. Solmi’s smooth features are deceptive; he’s a foul-mouthed maverick and good with his fists.Sit through Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last saw John Simm on ITV in 2018’s Hong Kong-based murder mystery Strangers, a product from the Jack and Harry Williams script factory which wasted its exotic backdrops with a plot which mooched about in a dispirited fashion before dozing off entirely. This new two-hour detective drama, adapted from Peter James’s novel Dead Simple, starred Simm as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. No doubt the hope is that Grace will blossom into a hardy perennial destined eventually for permanent rotation alongside Poirot, Morse, Foyle and the rest of ITV3’s roster of indestructible ‘tecs.It's by no Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There comes a time when every successful formula can do with an overhaul, and that particular bell may be tolling for Unforgotten (ITV). Regular viewers will be familiar with writer Chris Lang’s modus operandi – a corpse (usually grotesque and of indeterminate age) is discovered, and before you can say “autopsy” cold case experts Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sajeev Bhaskar) are poking around in the innards. Then they track down a network of potential suspects who were connected with the deceased.This latest case adheres to the blueprint with unswerving exactitude, though it’s Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the sadnesses of covid is that films like Judas and the Black Messiah have been held over for release in the hope that cinemas will reopen. Immersive, intense features like this deserve to be seen in a darkened theatre with no distractions. But as the pandemic drags on in the UK, distributors are forced to debut big films on the small screen and it’s a real shame in this instance. Writer-director Shaka King tells the true story of two young men whose fates intertwined in the civil rights movement in Chicago in 1969. Daniel Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, the charismatic Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I’ll admit, I’ve never been a fan of murder mysteries. Patience is not one of my virtues; if I can’t work something out in 30 seconds, I’m liable to give up, and whodunnits tend to need a bit longer than that. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Hung Parliament was, therefore, a lovely surprise: well-paced and earnest without taking itself too seriously, it’s a new interactive experience from Les Enfants Terribles, the company known for madcap, immersive work like their 2016 Olivier-nominated Alice’s Adventures Underground (which returned the following year). Don’t be fooled by Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s dark 1970s satire on state corruption. The narrative follows an unnamed, psychologically-distressed police chief who, after secretly committing a brutal crime, inserts himself into the ensuing investigation. He does so – he tells us – not to assure his innocence, but to verify his own conviction: that he is a citizen above suspicion.Performing the role of that titular cittadino is Gian Maria Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on a book by Roberto Saviano, author of the Neapolitan gang saga Gomorrah, ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic) is an account of the international drugs trade and the way its tentacles wrap themselves around the entrails of societies at all levels. It’s a lavishly-mounted and beautifully photographed production with the feel of a big-budget movie like Sicario or Traffic, knitting together storylines in Mexico, New Orleans and Calabria in south-west Italy.It’s also a story riddled with sadistic violence and torture and may not be everyone’s idea of escapist lockdown viewing, but it exerts a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Film is the new theatre – this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story? The latest example of this problematic switch from stage to screen is the strongly acted Shook, Samuel Bailey’s debut play, which won the 2019 Papatango New Writing Prize and had a run at the Southwark Playhouse in November of that year. Although its planned transfer to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End was curtailed when the pandemic hit, the drama has been superbly filmed and is available to watch online on the Papatango website.Set in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a happy ending (or at least not the bloodbath that had threatened to erupt).A series of Spiral often takes a few episodes to crank up a full head of steam, as this one did, but once character, situation and plot start to knit together, it has been as tense and addictive as anything on TV. The story of Moroccan teenager Amin, whose murdered body got the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried out by a pair of seemingly unwitting women at Kuala Lumpur airport by smearing Jong-nam (pictured below) with VX nerve agent.Ryan White’s documentary about Jong-nam’s death may contain material familiar to keen conspiracy fans, but it’s still an extraordinary story. White has buttressed his narrative with accounts from witnesses and lawyers, as well Read more ...