Crime

News, Reviews & Features
  • The Snowman

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 12th October 2017

    Murder mysteries exist in a weird sort of critical stasis while you're watching them, because any story that hinges on an explosive final act reveal floats in limbo until it has shown its hand. Such a reveal - a surprise identity, a killer motive, a shock twist - may cause you to reassess everything you've already seen. The best films of the genre do just that: they cleverly subvert what you think you saw, fill in plot gaps you didn't know were there and, like a smug serial killer, flaunt the fact that they've been one step ahead of you the whole time. Yeah, The Snowman does not do any of that. You watch attentively and wait patiently and cross your legs and twiddle your thumbs but come the crushingly disappointing final act, the only dawning realisation you have is this: The Snowman is a bad movie and it turns out it had been all along. Twist!

  • Public Enemies

    Movie Review | Ali | 29th June 2009

    On paper, this movie has it all. A credit crunch-defying story about renegades sticking it to the money men. A mouth-watering A-list face-off between two of the coolest bastards on the planet. A director who couldn't direct a shitty shoot-out if Michael Bay had him at gun-point. Why, then, does it feel so lacking? Despite all th...

  • Righteous Kill

    Movie Review | Ali | 5th October 2008

    "Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver, 1976. Thirty odd years later and Robert De Niro has finally taken those words to heed in Righteous Kill, playing a crooked cop dishing out street justice to evil-doers alongside fellow crusader Al Pacino in a match-up that's had f...