fri 11/07/2025

crime

Blu-ray: Force of Evil

Force of Evil is much more than a stunning film noir classic: it’s first and foremost a film about money and power and their tragic power of attraction. Set in the world of the numbers racket in New York, where the big combinations, created by...

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Ocean's 8 review – half-cocked caper

Perfectly timed, in theory, for the advent of #MeToo and Hollywood’s post-Weinstein era, this girl-power redesign of the Ocean franchise has lined up a turbo-charged cast and then not given them anything very interesting to do. Director and co-...

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Get Shorty, Sky Atlantic review - Elmore Leonard meets Tarantino

Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by”...

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Hidden, BBC Four review - a death in Snowdonia

Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.Hidden (or Craith in Welsh) stems from the same BBC Cymru Wales/S4C...

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The Strange Death of John Doe, Hampstead Theatre review - ambitious but not entirely successful

Regular air travel is a hassle. All that queuing, all that security, all those hot halls, and then the endless waiting, the bawling kids and the limited legroom. Basically air travel sucks. But at least it’s reasonably safe. The same cannot be said...

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Killer Joe, Trafalgar Studios review - family drama, creepy and cruel

Right from the beginning of Simon Evans’s production of Tracy Letts's 1993 play, it’s clear we’re in for an intense, raw experience. A storm of almost symphonic musical accompaniment roars, lightning flashing over the claustrophobic trailer...

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My Friend Dahmer review - sympathy for the devil

“He’s not a sideshow attraction,” we hear towards the end of Marc Meyers’s queasily compelling My Friend Dahmer, when one of the “Dahmer Fan Club”, a group of high school sham-friends-cum-taunters who have been treating the film’s teen protagonist...

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Innocent, ITV review - David Collins wants his life back

Addressing the baying media on the steps of the courthouse after being acquitted of murdering his wife, for which non-crime he’d spent the last seven years in prison, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) was a bitter and angry man. He wanted to expose the...

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The Bridge, BBC Two, series 4 review - Scandi saga is darker than ever

In the 1990s, which brought us Morse, Fitz and Jane Tennison, an idea took root that all television detectives must be mavericks. They needed to be moody, dysfunctional, addictive, a bit of an unsolved riddle. These British sleuths were all...

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Anon review - adventures in cyber-noir

Though set in a futuristic (although not by much) world in which information technology has almost taken over the human psyche, Anon still relies on a crumpled whisky-drinking gumshoe for its protagonist. In this case, the relict of Sam Spade and...

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Law and Order, BBC Four review - not a fair cop

In the late 1970s the British establishment sustained a bloody nose. Roland Huntford published his debunking of Captain Scott and Anthony Blunt was outed as the Fourth Man, while the Old Etonian Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe was tried for...

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DVD/Download: Lies We Tell

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...

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