The Sweeney

THE SWEENEY Legendary Seventies cop show reduced to rubble by director Nick Love

Legendary Seventies cop show reduced to rubble by director Nick Love

If you saw previous Nick Love efforts like The Football Factory or Outlaw, you'll know he likes nothing better than a lairy swagger down Geezer Street while slaughtering innocent bystanders. He's at it again here, with this glaringly unnecessary remake of  Seventies cop show The Sweeney, a TV institution that very nearly justifies the use of the crassly abused-to-death term "iconic".

Berberian Sound Studio

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO Toby Jones swaps his garden shed for hardcore horror in Peter Strickland’s ingenious, giallo-inspired thriller

Toby Jones swaps his garden shed for hardcore horror in Peter Strickland’s ingenious, giallo-inspired thriller

If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores.

CD: Chris Brown - Fortune

R&B's bad boy demands to be judged on bad music rather than unexpired crimes

Like most things about the suited, bespectacled image of Chris Brown that stares intensely at something to his right from his new album’s cool blue artwork (currently: the remains of the delicious spicy chicken pizza I had for dinner), the title Fortune is not an accident. For Brown has, as anybody who hasn’t been living under some pop culture rock these past three years, been a very fortunate lad.

Rampart

RAMPART: Woody Harrelson is on blistering form in a police thriller from the pen of James Ellroy

Woody Harrelson is on blistering form in a police thriller from the pen of James Ellroy

A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery.

DVD: Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine's award-winning debut is heavy on the swearing but ultimately uplifting

I started keeping a swear word tally at the start of Paddy Considine’s Leeds-set Tyrannosaur and abandoned my efforts several minutes in when it looked as if I was about to fill an entire page. As the film begins, Peter Mullan’s character Joseph does something truly unspeakable to a dog. He then racially abuses the post office clerk where he’s cashing his giro and smashes the shop window. This is a character sorely in need of redemption, and it is to the film’s credit that Joseph’s upward trajectory turns out to be so gripping to watch.

Coriolanus

CORIOLANUS: Ralph Fiennes brings Shakespeare's bellicose mama's boy to the screen

Ralph Fiennes brings Shakespeare's bellicose mama's boy to the screen, with Vanessa Redgrave as mum

Ralph Fiennes' commitment to the theatre, not least the classical repertoire, has long been a source of wonder, bringing legions of Voldemort followers to see him live, most recently as a movingly hirsute, brooding Prospero in an otherwise heavy-going account of The Tempest. So Fiennes deserves double credit for transmuting the Bardic passions that launched him on stage to the global marketplace of the screen, especially with a title that exists some way from the Hamlet-driven norm that tends to be the Shakespearean celluloid transfer of choice - as Fiennes' fell

DVD: In a Better World

Yet another gripping Danish drama

What is it about Denmark? What, specifically, is it about Danish drama? I am currently fourth in the queue to borrow a box set of The Killing ( I know, I know: late), which all experts advise is as lethal as crack and to which Jennifer Saunders lately paid hilarious homage in Absolutely Fabulous. Borgen has just started trafficking across our screens, and last autumn there was the piercingly good low-budget film The Silence, partly German but also robustly Danish in its aesthetics and ethics.

The Slap: Australia’s Dramatic Maelstrom Comes to DVD

What’s on the surface only goes so deep

theartsdesk’s Howard Male pointed out that The Slap was overshadowed by BBC Four’s concurrent screening of The Killing. The arrival of the series on DVD brings an opportunity to brush off the lint that might have stuck to it and consider whether it will have a staying power. Will it become a box-set essential?

Goon

Saga of knuckleheaded hockey player surprises with hidden depths

A capsule summary of Goon doesn't sound very appetising - slow-witted hockey player with awesome fighting skills helps lift the Halifax Highlanders out of their low-achieving doldrums. Yet within the film's oafish wrapping lies a touching little tale of oddball relationships and characters struggling to find their place in the world, set against a melancholy backdrop of small-town Canada in iron-hard winter weather.

Gillian Slovo: Writing The Riots

The novelist and playwright explains the genesis of the Tricycle's new verbatim play

I was shocked by the riots. I think everybody was shocked by the riots. It’s not just the scale of the rioting that was shocking. It’s the failure of the police and the fire services to take control of the situation. During my research for The Riots I interviewed a man who had his flat burned down and he told me that he couldn’t believe this could happen in a democracy.