crime
Spiral, Series 8 Finale, BBC Four review - justice is done in stormy climactic episodesSunday, 31 January 2021
If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a... Read more... |
Assassins review - unravelling the bizarre death of Kim Jong-namSaturday, 30 January 2021
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried... Read more... |
Marcella, Series 3, ITV review - Anna Friel returns as the defective detectiveWednesday, 27 January 2021
Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet... Read more... |
The Serpent, BBC One review - tracking down the hippie-trail murdererSaturday, 02 January 2021
“They’re only rich assholes.They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he... Read more... |
I'm Your Woman review - what's happening, indeed?Saturday, 12 December 2020
"What's happening?", or so Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) asks time and again in I'm Your Woman, voicing the very question posed by an audience. Bewilderment would seem to be a constant state of being in director and co-writer Julia Hart's film, which... Read more... |
The Dumb Waiter, Hampstead Theatre review - menace without a hint of mirthThursday, 10 December 2020
Add the Hampstead Theatre to the swelling ranks of playhouses opening its doors this month, in this case with a revival well into rehearsal last spring when the first lockdown struck. Re-cast in the interim, Alice Hamilton's 60th-anniversary... Read more... |
County Lines review - a scary descent into drug-dealer purgatoryThursday, 03 December 2020
This debut feature by writer/director Henry Blake is a shocking and remarkably assured drama about the “county lines” trade, where children are used as drug traffickers. Using mobile phones, city-based drug dealers employ kids to ferry their product... Read more... |
The Undoing, Series Finale, Sky Atlantic review - bluff and double-bluff as the truth is revealedTuesday, 01 December 2020
Throughout its preceding five episodes, The Undoing (Sky Atlantic) has skilfully, if a little shamelessly, kept the fickle finger of suspicion in perpetual motion. Though Hugh Grant’s oily, untrustworthy oncologist Jonathan Fraser has been smack in... Read more... |
What a Carve Up!, Barn Theatre online review – ingenious whodunnitMonday, 30 November 2020
Classical murder mysteries end with a neat solution — and with the arrest of the perpetrator. Postmodern murder mysteries play games with the genre, turning it upside down and inside out. This film adaptation of What a Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe’s 1994... Read more... |
Time review - a stunning portait of enduring loveThursday, 15 October 2020
Sometimes in fictional cinema, a character can seem so strong, so righteous, that you begin to doubt the reality of the piece. How can anyone be that good when faced with such hardship? Perhaps these thoughts make us feel better about ourselves, and... Read more... |
Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands review - a case of murder mindTuesday, 29 September 2020
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises performed by Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015 and then set aside to marinade in a desk drawer while the world fell apart. Moshfegh’s characters “zoom... Read more... |
Hendrix and the Spook review - a search for clarity in murky watersSaturday, 19 September 2020
September 18th is the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, an appropriate moment to release Hendrix and the Spook, a documentary exploring the vexed question: was it murder, suicide or a tragic accident? Trying to unravel this conundrum,... Read more... |
