Edgar Allan Poe fathered the detective genre as well as a school of Gothic horror, and Scott Cooper’s adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 1830-set novel acts as an origin story for the author and the whodunnit.
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel is an even more brightly entertaining puzzle picture, revelling in the old-fashioned glamour of enviably sunny climes and another rogues’ gallery of piquantly deployed film stars. Self-styled world’s greatest detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is again on hand to pick up the inevitably murderous pieces.
The last couple of series of Shetland (BBC One) brought the previously much-loved series alarmingly close to shark-jumping territory, converting the remote and thinly-populated Shetland archipelago into a war zone teeming with people-trafficking gangs, murderers and drug dealers. Can Series 7 restore some sanity?
Connoisseurs of the Britbox streaming service may already have caught up with this three-part series, which has evidently been pressed into service on ITV to pad out TV’s annual summer slump. They could have called it Midsomer Murders Goes to the Côte d’Azur, as it details the adventures of Investigating Judge Antoine Verlaque (Roger Allam) and his partner Marine Bonnet, a criminal psychologist played by Nancy Carroll.
Director Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971) has been praised as the best British gangster film. I would go even further, and put it up against the best gangster films of all time, on the same level as Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Melville’s Le deuxième souffle (1966), Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).
In the middle of a pavement-cracking, railway-melting heatwave, what could be more refreshing than a visit to the bleak but bracing landscapes of the Faroe Islands? This 18-island archipelago midway between Norway and Iceland is where BBC Four’s latest Nordic drama is situated, and its themes of murder, conspiracy and ecological awareness strike a topical note.
Suspect has a simple premise: a detective goes on a routine visit to a mortuary where an unidentified young woman has been taken after being found hanged. Suicide is the initial judgment: the cop, Danny Frater (James Nesbitt), grills the pathologist (Joely Richardson, pictured below) about the case and starts to leave. Then he pauses, policing instincts a-twitch, and uncovers the body’s head.
It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.
As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.
The Driller Killer, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer form a self-descriptive yet misunderstood trinity in American cinema’s sordid underground. Originally subtitled Sympathy for the Devil, Henry modernised the serial killer as protagonist, minus Hopkins' later suave intellect as Lecter, or Dexter’s benign foibles.