thrillers
Nick Hasted
Will Smith’s giant hand looms out of the screen towards you, gripping his gun’s trigger with weird realism. Director Ang Lee’s lonely devotion to filming in 120 frames per second 4K 3D, already widely loathed by audiences in less developed form in his own Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2014) and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, is a huge, largely successful element in everything we see here.A script which had gathered dust for 20 years due to being technically unfilmable then sees Smith’s government hitman Henry Brogan forced out of retirement after being betrayed by his boss Clay (Clive Owen), Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What did we learn at the end of The Capture (BBC One)? A rice jar is a good place to hide USB sticks. It’s possible to withhold the opening credits for 11 whole minutes. A green coat works exceptionally well with light blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair. And Ben Chanan, who originated the script and directed it himself, is a television dramatist to watch, and watch again.Whether we’ll be watching another round of The Capture remains to be discovered. We were left with the possibility that DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), having weighed up her options, has set herself up as a mole Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Three women decide to take over their husbands’ criminal activities, proving more than a match for the men who dominate the underworld. If this outline of The Kitchen sounds familiar, it’s because it was just last year that Steve McQueen’s lauded crime thriller Widows had much the same premise. That said, screenwriter Andrea Berloff’s first film as a director is a very different animal, far less polished but an entertaining thriller in its own right.The differences are instructive. Widows was based on a highly regarded British TV series, relocated to contemporary Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver. The sound of approaching police sirens indicated the way events were heading.This had been intercut with shots of Dr Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) making a furtive-looking late night visit to a hospital, ostensibly to retrieve his missing diary. In fact he was nicking a bag-full Read more ...
Heather Neill
It may help if you love the book. It was a runaway bestseller, so fans must be legion, but a suspenseful story which depends on memories being obscured by prodigious boozing, and featuring a trio of women best described as "flaky", all defining themselves too much by their relationships with unreliable men, is not to everyone's taste. For newcomers to book or film (Emily Blunt won an Oscar nomination for the New York-set movie), it may be best to approach this as a harsher, suburban, sex-filled variation on The Mousetrap. For all the modern trappings, the real interest - especially so in the Read more ...
Owen Richards
It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes. Stranger Things 3 is blockbuster television, full of the laughs, jumps and exaggerated nostalgia that made it such a hit in 2016.After a mixed-bag second season, creators The Duffer Brothers have returned to their winning formula. Gone are the Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Farrow’s inexplicably neglected 1948 thriller The Big Clock is a difficult work to pigeonhole, combining traces of noir, screwball comedy and suspense. Farrow’s source material was a novel by poet and pulp fiction writer Kenneth Fearing, here adapted by crime author and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer. Visually it’s spectacular, the first establishing shot moving from a dark New York skyline to the interior of the art deco Janoth Building in (almost) one single take, showing us Ray Milland’s George Stroud taking refuge inside the titular timepiece. It’s a flashback, and there’s a first- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great, a new drama not by the Williams brothers. Instead it’s Dan Sefton’s second iteration of his medical thriller Trust Me, last seen in 2017 starring Jody Whittaker. Since she’s off being Doctor Who, the new series has a new cast, with John Hannah as Dr Archie Watson and Ashley Jensen as physio Debbie Dorrell.Front and centre, though, is Corporal Jamie McCain (Alfred Enoch), who’s been brought to the neurological unit of South Lothian hospital after suffering a spinal injury during a shoot-out in Syria. He’s currently in the “spinal shock” phase (in medic-speak), which has left him with Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Disappointment is instant, anyway. David Robert Mitchell’s second film, It Follows, was a teenage horror tragedy of perfectly sustained emotion. His third, Under the Silver Lake, seems superficial and scattershot, a callow effort at a magnum opus, in which the former work’s feeling is replaced by pop culture riffs. Keep watching, though, and the superficiality at least has a point, and its lead actor, Andrew Garfield, makes its heart beat.Garfield’s Sam lives in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, resenting work and so unable to pay his rent. Binoculars to ogle his topless neighbour and phone- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This might just be the most challenging film review I’ve had to write in decades. The best thing would be to go and see Border knowing nothing more than that it won the prize for most innovative film at Cannes. Don't watch the trailer, and definitely don’t read those lazy reviewers who complete their word count by writing a detailed synopsis ruining every reveal and plot twist. Border is simply brilliant and best seen clean, although a duty of care means that viewers of a delicate disposition are warned that there’s a significant amount of body horror on screen. Fans of David Cronenberg, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist; he’s putting in the hours as an estate agent having put his artistic aspirations on ice. Typical millennials. They’re in love. Or rather, we’re told they’re in love. In fact, we’re told rather a lot of things - it seems to be the book’s mode. Dan is mixed-race, was brought up in Peckham by his mum and hasn’t been abroad all that much: “I’m a city boy, aren’t I? And I don’t speak French.” Bea, on the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways the world remembers. Erasing the histories of slavery and the Holocaust, of blacks and Jews, is just the beginning. The premise of Sam Bourne’s thrilling novel is the existence of a conspiracy to annihilate all the evidence of historic atrocities through the millennia. Books, of course, must go, and in a neat twist even the biggest book distribution centres, Amazon included, are targeted. Bourne’s great gift is to take reality and give it a good shove, a what if? that we are persuaded Read more ...