DVD: London Boulevard

William Monahan's pungent gangster flick is very nearly a contender

Having amasssed bankable screenwriting kudos for Edge of Darkness and The Departed, William Monahan made his writer/director debut with London Boulevard, a reworking of Ken Bruen's novel burnished with useful marquee glitz from headliners Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley.

Beyond good and evil: Silk goes to court

Maxine Peake and Rupert Penry-Jones (second left and centre) head the cast of Peter Moffat's new six-part legal series

Sparks fly as battling barristers fight to become QCs

The legal drama has become a staple of stage and screen, for a variety of excellent reasons. All of human life really is there, from love and hate to good and evil, crammed into the claustrophobic cockpit of the courtroom. Adding an extra squirt of kerosene to an already explosive mix is the fact that, as Dr Gregory House likes to say, “Everybody lies.”

The Next Three Days

Russell Crowe plays a poker face in a prison-break movie with a difference

For a while back there, Russell Crowe was incapable of a false move. LA Confidential, Gladiator and The Insider all flagged up a thrilling talent for pugnacious individualism. Here was an actor with a bit of dog in him, a street-smart upgrade on Mel Gibson. Then he went and inherited Gibson’s gift for naff headlines. Maybe it’s an Aussie He-Man thing. Either way, the pictures got a bit smaller as tales of the incredible expanding ego did the global rounds. The films that could channel and contain Crowe’s animal aggression stopped happening.

Inside, Studio Theatre, Roundhouse

Segun Oliaya as Brownie, hard-man top dog in Philip Osment's extraordinarily original new play

A violent, humorous, hugely powerful insight into the male mind-set

It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have or have not been subjected to in childhood. And, in this case in particular, the role fathering has or hasn’t played in the development of that individual.

Mr Nice

MR NICE Howard Marks, who has died, was the subject of a biopic starring Rhys Ifans

Like its subject Howard Marks, this biopic is in over its head

Howard Marks was a pothead Errol Flynn, living a life of remarkable escapades and hair's-breadth escapes. A Welsh working-class Oxford graduate in nuclear physics and philosophy, he’d be fascinating company even if he wasn’t once the world’s most successful dope smuggler, and an associate of the IRA, the CIA, the Mob and MI6. His autobiography, Mr Nice, has let Marks earn a living reminiscing about it ever since. But Bernard Rose’s adaptation casts inadvertent doubt on such cult heroism. Marks’s life here seems somehow inconsequential.

Father & Son, ITV1

Dougray Scott as Michael O'Connor, unable to escape his gangland connections

Dougray Scott shines in grim but impressive Manchester crime saga

I always used to wonder why casting directors ever sent for Dougray Scott when they might just as well have used an old chest of drawers or a pile of deckchairs instead, but at last this gloomy Scottish actor seems to be coming into his own. Maybe his stint in Desperate Housewives kicked something loose, but he wasn't bad at all in BBC One's Day of the Triffids at New Year, and he's better still in this four-part gangster drama set in Manchester's terrifying criminal underworld.

Wormwood Scrubs, ITV1

'It’s a thankless task cuffing and lugging miscreants from cell to cell'

Does prison work? As a documentary, yes

Last night in Wormwood Scrubs a prisoner hanged himself. Successfully. A doctor confirmed “that life is now non-existent”. Later on the same wing it happened again, only this time the suicide attempt didn't come off. For many years it has felt as if the great tradition of television documentary is now non-existent. Programmes like this give you hope that, like that second man on a wire in D Wing, it might just pull through.

Lion's Den

Martina Gusman in Pablo Trapero's prison drama Lion's Den

Women behind bars in a thrilling prison drama from Argentina

Since his astonishing debut Crane World a decade ago, the Argentine Pablo Trapero has been quietly asserting himself as one of the world’s most singular directors. He’s perhaps best known for his breezy verité approach – shooting on location, often using non-actors, and drawing his subjects from everyday Argentine life. At the same time, Trapero has always dallied, slyly, with genre: Rolling Family might be called a road movie, El Bonaerense a cop drama, though each is subverted so as to accord with his desire to be true to quotidian reality.

theartsdesk Masterclass: Jacques Audiard on A Prophet

Behind-the-scenes secrets from one of France's most exciting directors

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrives in Britain laden with plaudits (Best Film at the London Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and a fistful of superlative reviews). Here, in the first of a series of illustrated masterclasses, in which leading directors introduce clips from their work, Audiard reveals the secrets of how he shot two of A Prophet's memorable scenes.

A Prophet

THEARTSDESK AT 7: A PROPHET Jacques Audiard's different sort of prison movie

Jacques Audiard's Cannes Grand Jury winner is a different sort of prison movie

A Prophet is a different sort of prison movie. Jacques Audiard's follow-up to The Beat That My Heart Skipped is another dip into the criminal underworld, and mostly takes place in a French jail. Nearly every other film or TV series I can think of which is set behind bars (Prison Break, The Shawshank Redemption, Papillon and so on) is concerned with escape. Even the two most celebrated French prison movies, A Man Escaped and Le trou, are about finding a way out.