police
Jasper Rees
We’re three films into Rowan Atkinson’s tenure as Inspector Maigret and so far he’s barely twitched a facial muscle. Gone are the eye bulges and nostril flares, the rubbery pouts. There’s sometimes a hint of a frown, the odd twinge in a wrinkle around the eyes, but Atkinson’s performance continues mainly to be about keeping his cards superglued to his chest. Gnomic is about the size of it.The murder Maigret was investigating in Maigret's Night at the Crossroads (ITV) was of a Jewish jewel fence called Goldberg who, we later discovered, was recklessly eager to pull off one last high-yield deal Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The jacket designs of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole thrillers don’t muck about. The novelist’s name with its anglicised spelling is branded in eye-catching upper-case yellow, accompanied by the latest sales figures. "Over five million copies sold worldwide" – that was several crime novels ago. It has since gone up in vertical increments: nine million, 18 million, 23 million, 30 million. The current tally on the 11th case for Oslo detective Harry Hole is 33 million.The Thirst arrives four years on from Police, and is sort of a sequel. In Police a series of policemen were killed by gruesome means. As Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Sunshine, sex and oodles of style: Vera (ITV) has no truck with any of them and is therefore unusual among Sunday evening dramas. There’s no escaping its mission to prove it’s grimy up north.The Blanket Mire, the fourth and final mystery of this seventh series, began with grey skies and torrential rain. A team of geologists, floundering in mud, unearthed a human arm. It belonged to an 18-year-old girl who has been missing for six weeks.There was no shortage of suspects: a dumped boyfriend, a handsome ex-soldier (Jonjo O’Neill, pictured right), the lead singer of a local band and a field of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now promoted to the exhilarating landscapes of BBC One as a reward for previous good behaviour, Line of Duty set off at a scorching pace into the murky shadowland where crime, punishment, ambition and corruption mingle treacherously. Stretching back to Lennie James’s DCI Gates in the first series, the show has a great tradition of hiring guest stars and then treating them very badly indeed. For this fourth season, it’s Thandie Newton as DCI Roz Huntley, who’s been looking for a breakthrough in an ongoing investigation called Operation Trapdoor.So far this has encompassed one dead woman and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important matters had come to a close. I was dubious about LoD when it began in 2012, but what has gradually become apparent is that its mastermind Jed Mercurio (pictured below) has been playing a long, labyrinthine game. Now the fourth series is upon us – promoted to BBC One from BBC Two – and judging by the first episode, it has the potential to be another Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese criminal gang at the heart of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho nightlife district, the traditional turf of Japan’s own deeply entrenched native criminal element. But Miike’s work – at its best when it’s most unsettling, and that's something that goes beyond the sometimes cringingly unforgettable violence – is about bringing all sorts of other different things Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The aura of Ben Affleck burneth bright. It only seems about 10 minutes ago that he starred in The Accountant, and now here’s Live by Night, his fourth outing as director, and the second movie on which he’s been writer, director and star. He’ll be performing that multitasking feat again on the forthcoming solo-Batman flick The Batman, when he’s not putting in guest appearances in all the “DC extended universe” franchise spin-offs.If a gangster movie could ever be described as a “romp”, Live by Night would be that film, as it vaults across the Prohibition years of the Twenties and Thirties Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're back at Friday Street, the crumbling cop shop on the wrong side of Manchester, where DI Viv Deering marshals her squad of anarchic misfits to fight crime. Paul Abbott's rude but not crude police comedy drama was a great hit first time round and managed to be riotously unPC while unravelling a complicated serial murder case. And, as with the late, great Cagney and Lacey, some of the best scenes were in the ladies' loo; two of Deering's closest aides are women (played by Elaine Cassidy and Alexandra Roach).At the end of the first series we learned that Deering's husband was the killer and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat. It’s a familiar story of amorality and betrayal – the most effective cops are those who think like criminals themselves and are willing to cross the line to nail their target – but told with such slick energy that all clichés are forgiven.Based on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you thought that a contemporary drama about forcible repatriation, set in an Immigration removal centre, would be about the plight of those confined in places like the infamous Yarl’s Wood, in Removal Men writers MJ Harding and Jay Miller give us something unexpected.Instead of the place's inmates, their play concentrates on what it might be like to work in such an environment. Its origins came when Harding – a founder of the band Fat White Family, sharing composer credits with Jonah Brody – became involved with an intervention to prevent the deportation of a detainee at Yarl’s Wood. He Read more ...