thrillers
Nick Hasted
Spielberg’s prequel to All the President’s Men was filmed at speed, and aimed squarely at the press-hating Trump, not the late Tricky Dick. This contemporary intent is already fading. What remains is the director’s second return, after Munich, to the sort of Seventies conspiracy thriller dabbled in by his own great hits of the decade, Jaws and Close Encounters. The story of the 1971 exposé by government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the US government’s true, knowingly doomed conduct in Vietnam, is framed here by a less important question: whether the Read more ...
Owen Richards
Deep in an unnamed desert, a violent and psychedelic retribution is sought. The aptly named Revenge is a brutally rewarding experience, bringing classic horror and exploitation tropes kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It is the debut feature from French writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who combines a low opinion of men, visual panache and disturbing imagination to create a taut, bright thrill ride.We begin at a villa, where the smug, rich Richard (Kevin Jannsens, pictured below right) has brought his mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz, pictured below left) for some fun before a hunting Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut keeps you guessing on matters of culpability right through to the closing exchange. But one can't help but feel in places that less would be more, however pleased one is to clock the continued career ascent of its leading players. The near-ubiquitous Buckley plays the novelistically-named Moll, who has a job as a tour guide that she loathes and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Eight months have passed since the Russians invaded Norway in the first season of Jo Nesbo’s neo-Cold War thriller. Real-life events have only made Occupied seem more relevant. Like Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes, it dramatises the clash between two world views: lily-livered liberalism versus ruthless realpolitik or, if you prefer, truth and lies. No wonder, on viewing it in Moscow, the Kremlin saw red.The theory is embodied with sweaty physicality. Season two opens with Jesper Berg (Henrik Mestad) and Anita Rygh (Janne Heltberg) bonking with typical Scandinavian abandon. (This naked Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It is with some trepidation that the globe-trotting viewer embarks on a new drama from Spain. Last year in BBC Four stole the best part of 20 hours of some lives with its split-series transmission of the maddening I Know Who You Are. Lifeline (Channel 4) – original title: Pulsaciones – comes with a "Walter Presents" kitemark of quality. And with a sci-fi twist, it asks a what-if question about the transplant industry: what would happen if the recipient of the titular lifeline were to inherit more from the original owner than a mere organ? It opened generically, with a soon-to-be-murdered 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 ...
Katherine Waters
Ros and Ray are old hippies made good. She’s a hard-bitten, hard-working teacher in an inner-city Pennsylvania school where her pupils rob 7-Elevens on Fridays and the staff have a betting pool on how many times she gets called "white bitch". He’s a member of the one percent, a corporate heavyweight who’s always trying to see “the bigger picture” but who drives a Merc and – by his own admission – pulled himself out of poverty to become a wealthy financier.Even on the cusp of retirement they’re still besotted with each other, their love conversely made stronger by the frank Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “hideously white” and, despite the sterling work of groups such as Yellow Earth theatre company, there have been several casting controversies where white actors have played Chinese and East Asian characters. So the first thing to say about Francis Turnly’s epic The Great Wave, staged by the National Theatre in a co-production with the Tricycle Theatre Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As it turns out, the slashed-to-the-hip Versace dress with which Jennifer Lawrence provoked controversy (synthetic or otherwise) on a freezing London rooftop was an accurate barometer of what to expect from Red Sparrow. It has the nostalgic accoutrements of a Cold War thriller, and calls upon Ms Lawrence to bare provocative expanses of flesh at strategic intervals.It’s helmed by Francis Lawrence (no relation), who has previously directed Jen in three Hunger Games movies, but tonally it’s an odd mixture. Based on the similarly-named novel by retired CIA veteran Jason Matthews, it can boast a Read more ...
Rhidian Brook
When I was 23 I had a job selling butterflies in glass cases in America. I worked for a guy who, as well as being a butterfly salesman, had ambitions to be America’s first Pope (an ambition he ditched on account of him wanting to marry). I drove all over the US and sold in 32 states. It was 1987 and was pre-internet and pre-mobile phone, which increased the sensation of having an adventure in a land far, far away. I was not a novelist at the time but I told myself that I had to write about these butterflying days if I could. And so I did – 30 years later.I actually made a start in 1991 (I Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As Mom and Dad opens, after a comically shocking preface, the Ryan family are presented as a typical all-American middle-class family – albeit one that, strangely enough, can afford a daily maid who cooks their breakfast. The family bicker good-naturedly as any family does; teenage daughter Carly gets ready for school while her younger brother Josh play-fights with dad Brent (Nicolas Cage). But is that just the faintest whiff of false bonhomie when, amid the pulled punches and bear hugs, Brent shoots Josh (Zackary Arthur) a furious look? Or is it something worse? It is indeed something Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
London Rules – explicitly cover your arse – is the fifth in the most remarkable and mesmerising series of novels, set mostly and explicitly in London, to have appeared in years. It is hypnotically fascinating, absolutely contemporary, cynical and hopeful.The style is utterly Herron’s own: a series of elegant vignettes, a few short paragraphs, covering just a few days of mad and often deluded action. He fields a large cast of characters, from Jackson Lamb, the omniscient, obese, flatulent, greedy mess of an experienced, now disgraced MI5 spy, and his crew of much younger men and women who have Read more ...