sat 12/07/2025

crime

Murder on the Orient Express review - lushly upholstered, lightly remodelled ride

Kenneth Branagh, like his Poirot, cares about cutlery. The director and detective’s fastidiousness both find their ideal home on the Orient Express, where waiters measure fork placement with the precision of Poirot’s sacred monster of a moustache....

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Inspector George Gently, BBC One review - power, corruption and lies in his last-ever case

And now the end is near… and so Inspector George Gently faces his final case. Deemed too political to be broadcast in its original slot in May – 10 days before the General Election – Gently and the New Age was postponed until 8.30pm last...

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Witness for the Prosecution, London County Hall review - favourable verdict on Agatha Christie classic

Some site-specific theatre feels like a really good fit. You could say, in this case, that it seems like poetic justice. Agatha Christie’s 1953 play, Witness for the Prosecution, used to be a rep standard, and now gets a compelling new production in...

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Henning Mankell: After the Fire review - of death and redemption

The dour, reclusive disgraced doctor Fredrik Welin has appeared once before in Henning Mankell’s work, in The Italian Shoes. The shoes appear early on in After the Fire as ghosts, referred to as bespoke luxuries made by an admired craftsman, and...

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Tin Star, Sky Atlantic - broken characters stalked by remorseless fate

Sometimes you can find yourself hankering after those old-fashioned TV dramas where you got a self-contained story every week, so you can drop in on it at any time and still keep up with what’s going on. With Tin Star, on the other hand, you need to...

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Safe House, series 2, ITV review - the abduction and captivity show returns

Forget Christopher Eccleston and the Lake District. Two years on, Ed Whitmore’s ready-mix thriller Safe House returns with Stephen Moyer in Merseyside. He plays Tom Brook – not the venerable film critic (Talking Movies is still showing on BBC World...

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Top of the Lake: China Girl, BBC Two, series finale review - torpor not trauma

So who killed Cinnamon? Six weeks ago we saw the strangled sex-worker – packed in a pink suitcase – pushed into Bondi Bay. The finale of Top of the Lake: China Girl withheld enlightenment. Puss, the chief suspect, denied responsibility. Why would...

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The Limehouse Golem review - horrible history with a twist

How many more throats must be slit in 19th-century London before the river of blood starts to clot? The Limehouse Golem follows the gory footprints of Sweeney Todd and various riffs on the Ripper legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno...

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Strike: The Cuckoo's Calling, BBC One review - JK Rowling's debut in crime bows most promisingly

There’s a new ‘tec in town. Cormoran Strike may look like one of life’s losers – he’s on the edge of bankruptcy, sleeps in the office, and what passes for a personal life is a right mess – but in Tom Burke’s portrayal I suspect he’s going to be...

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Val McDermid: Insidious Intent review - dark and expert crime writing

Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since the late 1980s, all of them featuring a lead female protagonist. She herself worked as a journalist and a crime reporter, and the atmosphere is...

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Fred Vargas: The Accordionist review - intriguing Gallic sleuthing yarn

The two haunting series of crime novels by Fred Vargas, the writing pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian, have acquired a worldwide following: quirky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and beautifully written, they are highly individual and, for...

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I Know Who You Are, series finale, BBC Four review - gripping, but no one to root for

The first thing to say is that this wasn’t the actual end. BBC Four scheduled I Know Who You Are to run two episodes a night over five Saturdays. The innocent punter might have assumed that after 10 x 70 minutes of the Spanish import, we’d arrive at...

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