thrillers
Adam Sweeting
The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it. This explosive thriller is frequently shocking in its explicit violence, and its cynical view of power, crime and politics verges on the nihilistic, but it’s difficult to get its brutal imagery out of your mind.The original Sicario from 2015 had Emily Blunt on board as FBI agent Kate Macer, who provided a kind of startled audience’s-eye-view of the hardcore tactics of drug Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Cannes jury in 2017 gave best actress to Diane Kruger for her performance in In the Fade. She plays Katja, who turns avenging angel when her son and Turkish husband are murdered. It’s Kruger’s first acting role in her native German and she’s on screen for almost the entire film. Whether you are absorbed by the narrative of In the Fade (German title: Aus der Nichts) or find yourself distanced by the stylistic tics and plot holes, probably depends on how much Kruger/Katja convinces you. I kept being reminded of another intelligent, beautiful model turned actress, Jessica Lange, who took on Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.We inhabit his fictional world on the basis that he will portray a riff on reality with nuance and understanding, all the better to escort us through the Read more ...
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 ...