TO CATCH A KILLER (Cert 18, 119 mins, Sky Cinema, streaming from May 27 exclusively on Now, Thriller/Action)
Starring: Shailene Woodley, Ben Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo, Ralph Ineson, Frank Schorpion, Richard Zeman, Dusan Dukic.
ON NEW Year's Eve in Baltimore, a skilled marksman uses the booms of exploding pyrotechnics as cover to slaughter revellers at random from a high-rise vantage point.
In total, 29 people are killed and police race to the scene including emotionally scarred officer Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley), whose quick thinking preserves valuable video footage.
The culprit escapes without a trace of forensic evidence and Geoffrey Lammark (Ben Mendelsohn) leads the FBI response, flanked by his most trusted lieutenant Mackenzie (Jovan Adepo).
Lammark recruits Falco as a liaison between his team and Baltimore Police Department and he encourages the rookie to prove her worth as a detective despite deep reservations from the mayor (Frank Schorpion).
To Catch A Killer is a solid if predictable procedural crime thriller, which marks the English language debut of acclaimed Argentinian writer-director Damian Szifron.
His script, co-written by Jonathan Wakeham, lacks any of the dark, twisted humour or stylistic flourishes of his Oscar-nominated 2014 anthology Wild Tales.
Instead, this methodical manhunt nods repeatedly to The Silence Of The Lambs by casting Woodley as a thinly sketched replacement for Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling, who must overcome personal demons and prove herself in a world of toxic masculinity.
Characterisation lacks depth and the film's queasy conflation of hot button topics including gun control, mental illness and gay marriage fail to spark intelligent and meaty on-screen debate.
Szifron orchestrates the centrepiece shootouts with aplomb.
In this respect, he's on target.
Rating: 3/5
WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS (Five episodes, starts streaming from May 30 exclusively on Now, Comedy/Drama)
ONE of the biggest political scandals in modern American history – Watergate – provides the real-life backdrop to a comedic five-part mini-series, created by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, which canvasses for votes on Sky Atlantic and streams exclusively on Now.
In 1971, former CIA asset E Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and former FBI operative G Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) are recruited by the White House to probe the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
Serving under Richard Nixon, the two men blunder through the investigation and are subsequently sequestered to the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
Their contribution is a series of misguided covert operations, including bugging the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex.
The duo's actions threaten to topple a presidency they were supposed to protect and the men's respective families become collateral damage.
