This Year's Best Bleak Italian Crime Drama Has Arrived
Just under the (2024) wire! I'm already obsessed, so please join me - the water's brutal
Is there anything that says, hooray! It’s nearly Christmas! quite like an intense Italian crime drama about a deeply broken man? Didn’t think so. Allow me to introduce you to Sky Atlantic’s Dostoevsky. Plus, this week's other screen stunners in the new edition of Oi, Watch It! (7th-13th December). Your curated-from-the-chaos watch-list, coupled with my reviews and rantings. It’s a good week. A week of…breadth! That’s the word. But what are we if not complexities built upon flesh and bone? Well?
OI OI! WATCH IT OF THE WEEK
1)Your New Italian Crime Drama Obsession//Dostoevsky (Sunday)
What’s that? A messed-up cop chases down a killer in one of this year’s darkest shows? Ding! It’s what now? Italian? Ding ding ding ding jackpot! Truthfully, I could only ever be this gleeful about something so entirely committed to documenting the suffering it takes to be human (and the particular suffering it takes to be a human hunter of evil). On which point: episode one of Dostoevsky (Gomorrah’s third-cousin twice removed, if you will) opens with Detective (and Dad) Enzo Vitello (Filippo Timi) on the floor, pills scattered, narrating his suicide note. He’s saved by a call informing him of yet another murder victim (and a stomach-flipping vomit-sesh) and…we’re off! Safe in the hands of the D’Innocenzo Brothers (Boys Cry, Bad Tales) who more than know their way around cinematic telly and gritty trope-rejecting crime dramas. It’s beautiful, brutal stuff about obsession, loss and what keeping a soul costs. Watch it and wail.
Watch the first two episodes of Dostoevsky on Sky Atlantic, Sunday 8th Dec at 10pm
2)A New Horror Show to Stream//The Creep Tapes (available now)
If you thought ‘found footage’ was a noughties horror storytelling device unlikely to be resurrected, never mind given new life in episodic television…. surprise! Though The Creep Tapes - the series in question created by writer/director Patrick Brice and writer/actor Mark Duplass (The Morning Show’s manic producer Chip) - began life nigh-on a decade ago with feature film Creep (and Creep 2). And now, the meta-ate-meta-and then-had-a-meta-baby premise - serial killer Josef/Peachfuzz (Duplass) murders videographers on camera - has spawned this anthology of sorts constructed, like the films, from found footage videotapes, each episode the story of a different victim. Reviews - that are so far, shall we say, polarised - have criticised both the lack of character development in his victims, and lack of female characters. I mean, a)it’s not like we have a dearth of woman getting slaughtered on screen, lads and b)surely the brutal truth about serial killers is that they so often know nowt about their victims, choose them for broad or banal reasons that terrify precisely because they’re random. Does it all land? No. Are there flashes of kinda-genius? Yes. Did I stare transfixed at the telly as each episode rolled into another? I’m still there. It’s funny, trippy, weird, really stupid, really really awkward and still, crucially, genuinely scary (jump scares should never come that easy) - largely down to Duplass, an insane gift of a man/actor. One small disclaimer: the only episode not available on viewing was the final one about, yes, a woman. If they make everything I’ve said before a lie then I can only pledge to pull on my own wolf mask and go hunting (joking! Am I!).
Episodes 1-5 of The Creep Tapes are on Shudder now (available for £4.99/month after a 7-day free trial on Prime Video)
3)The Film That Declares Christmas Open*//Die Hard (Saturday)
*Or at least that festive argument open. You know…Of course it’s a Christmas movie! Of course it fucking isn’t! Frankly, who cares you absolute clowns! (Said with love, I’m pretty sure I commissioned a story on exactly this when EIC of EMPIRE. Sorry everyone). But, come on now. Bruce Willis at his most charming and flawed; Alan Rickman turning out an exquisite Hans Gruber (in his feature film debut. Debut! WTF!); the kind of tight, blood-pounding, fierce action that reminds you what action can do but rarely does…What more do you people want at any time of year? Oh, you want a viewing guide from Steven De Souza, John McTiernan and Jeb Stuart? Well, James Dyer and EMPIRE have you covered.
Watch Die Hard on Film4 on Saturday 7th Dec at 9pm
4)The Film That Should Declare Christmas Open*//Sleepless in Seattle (Sunday)
*OK, ignore everything I just said because the only acceptable film for application of this argument is Sleepless in Seattle. Yeah, yeah, there’s also Valentine’s Day and New Year in there, but the single most adorable moment in this film - and in fact any film from the 90s - is Meg Ryan (Annie Reed), driving home for Christmas, singing “Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!” right before she tunes in to hear widowed Sam (Tom Hanks) and his precocious child Jonah (Ross Malinger) spill their guts on late-night radio. And hey, if you happen to be in my orbit around new year/the most existential time of the year, you might even catch my weepy THIS is romance in movies! He just held her hand! It was… magic! performance/sob session. God, I miss Nora Ephron. God, I miss romance films. God, I miss Meg Ryan. God I miss Meg Ryan being in romance films written and directed by Nora Ephron. (And yes, of course it’s a Christmas movie).
Watch Sleepless in Seattle on Film4, Sunday 8th Dec at 6:55pm
5)The Talent Competition We Need//Portrait Artist of the Year (Wednesday)
I’m about four years deep into my unexpected (and uncharacteristic) Portrait Artist of the Year fixation (briefly: amateur and professional artists create live portraits, in four hours, of well-known sitters). If early episodes of X Factor now feel like lemon juice in your eyeball, Portrait Artist is a warm bath before flannel pyjamas fresh off the radiator. Tonight is the final, the clutch of remaining artists competing to win the title plus a £10k commission to whip up a portrait of Lorraine Kelly. Their sitters: actors Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne who, HOLD THE PHONE, are married. Did we know this? Why didn’t I know this! Sherwood, Alma’s Not Normal, The Selfish Giant Lorraine Ashbourne! Do you think they’d let me move in? Just for a bit. Just to sit near her. No? Maybe? Fine. If you’ve missed out, all previous episodes are on Sky and NOW.
Watch the Portrait Artist of the Year final on Sky Arts, Wednesday 11th Dec at 8pm. The winner’s episode follows at 9pm
6)A Big Screen Belter//Queer (Friday)
Daniel Craig and poetry make me nervous (I blame his turn as Ted Hughes in 2003’s Sylvia), so I can’t say it wasn’t like the local fire station on bonfire night in my head when I heard William S. Burroughs, and Luca Guadagnino. And well, it just shows what I know (nowt as Ted would have said) because Craig as Bill Lee (a thinly-veiled Burroughs in the autobiographical novel adapted here by Justin Kuritzkes) is utterly compelling; searching and sensual. Guadagnino himself searches out a more direct frame - vital when the frustrations and disappointments of desire are present - than in Call Me By Your Name, though the purple blossom pull us back to the fruit trees in Lombardy, the fuzz of ripe peaches heavy on the branch.
Queer (MUBI) arrives in cinemas on Friday 13th Dec. Check here for screenings
RANDOM SORT
7)A Thoughtful Howl Of A Documentary//LISTEN
This 2023 investigation into the murder of Utah college athlete Lauren McCluskey at the hands of her ex-boyfriend (and the failures that led there) remains one of the most powerful, most enraging documentaries I’ve seen on violence against women and girls. The ESPN film - led and built by journalists over four years - documents the preventable path through evidence, and interviews with Lauren’s family and friends, a campus police offer, parole agent and state Attorney General. But what truly makes this film so compelling is the deep care and time spent introducing us to Lauren, the girl, emerging woman, not just the victim - and it’s unsurprising that director Nicole Noren spoke to being a survivor of intimate partner violence herself. Six years on, some things have changed, but so much (most) hasn’t. This rallying cry still demands to be heard (and watched).
Watch LISTEN on ESPN’s YouTube channel now
Oh, and one last vital PSA before I depart (to finish an angry essay for you lucky buggers), The Shield has just recently pitched up on Prime Video. ENJOY.