crime
James Gandolfini 1961-2013Thursday, 20 June 2013
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an... Read more... |
The Fall, Series Finale, BBC TwoTuesday, 11 June 2013
In the end, it was always going to come down to the last episode whether The Fall was powerful female-driven drama or, to quote another writer for theartsdesk, “misogynistic torture porn”. That conclusion, however, was as elusive as the ending of... Read more... |
Mad Dogs, Sky 1/ Hannibal, Sky LivingWednesday, 05 June 2013
Previous series of Mad Dogs have seen the quartet of middle-aged geezers embroiled with the Serbian mafia and tangled up in drug deals, conspiracies and murder. For this series three opener, the curtain rose on our bedraggled lads caged up in a... Read more... |
The IcemanMonday, 03 June 2013
Ariel Vromen's third film, and his first to command a major cast, is the story of mob contract killer Richard Kuklinski who, from his incarceration in 1986 (charged with just a fraction of the murders he supposedly committed) until his death in 2006... Read more... |
The LiabilitySaturday, 18 May 2013
The title says it all. Whatever John Wrathall’s script for The Liability might have promised is resoundingly undelivered in Craig Viveiros’s direction, and that’s despite the presence of Tim Roth in a lead role, and Peter Mullan giving a supporting... Read more... |
The Fall, BBC TwoTuesday, 14 May 2013
You have to wonder if there any alternative themes permitted in TV drama apart from murder (preferably multiple, committed by a serial killer) or paedophilia. New five-parter The Fall plonks itself down squarely in category A, with its story of DS... Read more... |
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder in Angel Lane, ITVMonday, 13 May 2013
The disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator has become such a trope of contemporary noir that the fate of the first great modern detective, following the events of his first televised outing, is not particularly surprising. The Murder in Angel... Read more... |
Life of Crime/Murder on the Home Front, ITVSaturday, 11 May 2013
Another day, another murder to solve on ITV. Broadchurch, Endeavour and Foyle’s War all having recently ended, the channel has been in dire need of a fresh supply of corpses since, ooh, Monday morning. To the rescue, on consecutive nights, has come... Read more... |
Justified, Series 4, 5USAThursday, 09 May 2013
US drama is a funny thing. Given the obsession certain parts of the press have with the stuff, there are some shows whose names you will be familiar with regardless of whether you’ve ever seen an episode. But while your social media feed has been... Read more... |
The Mafia’s Secret Bunkers, BBC TwoThursday, 02 May 2013
I was once the summer guest of friends in southern Calabria, where the head of a hapless “family traitor” in the nearby village of Taurianova had been hacked off and then kicked around the piazza like a football: the news was greeted by the locals... Read more... |
Broadchurch, Series Finale, ITVTuesday, 23 April 2013
And the killer is... No, that would be telling, and you might not have watched it on catch-up yet. But was the revelation worth the wait?We often complain about the way British TV dramas are often squeezed into three or four (or two) parts, when an... Read more... |
BernieMonday, 22 April 2013
"There are people in town that would have shot her for five dollars." Those are the shocking but undeniably comic words of a resident of Carthage, Texas, who's nonchalantly describing the strength of the vitriol felt toward murder victim Marjorie... Read more... |
