Jack Taylor: The Dramatist (2012)

Director
Stuart Orme

Main cast
Iain Glen; Nora-Jane Noone; Fionn Walton

Genres
Crime, TV Movie

Description
Feature-length crime drama, starring Iain Glen as the private detective created by author Ken Bruen. The sleuth investigates the accidental deaths of two students which appear to be random, tragic events, but in each case a copy of a book by John Millington Synge is found beneath the body. He suspects that a calculating killer is out there, enticing him to play psychological games.


Similar movies

Private Detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich family. Before the complex case is over, he's seen murder, blackmail, and what might be love.
Private detective Philip Marlowe is asked by a publishing executive, Adrienne Fromsett, to locate the wife of her boss, publisher Derace Kingsby. Earlier she had sent her husband a telegram saying she was heading to Mexico to marry Chris Lavery. However Kingsby had recently seen Lavery in the neighbouring Bay City. Marlowe pursues his investigation at the Kingsby's lakeside cottage.
Cousins Thomas and David, owners of a mobile restaurant, team up with their friend Moby, a bumbling private detective, to save the beautiful Sylvia, a pickpocket.
Robert Mitchum's first take as Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe.
Chen Tan (Aaron Kwok), a private detective in Thailand, travels to Malaysia following a series of clues found in a photo. There he searches for a man called Chai, who might help reveal the truths behind the murder of his parents 30 years ago. Chen finds Zheng (Nick Cheung), a Malaysian detective born in China. Together they meet Chai's daughter, Zi-Wei (Jiang Yi Yan) who could hold the key to cracking the case.
A man wrongly imprisoned for murder breaks out of jail. He wants to clear his name, but with the police pursuing him, he's forced to take a beautiful young woman, driving a fast sports car, hostage and slip into a cross-border sports car race to try to make it to Mexico before the police get him.
Spade and Archer is the name of a San Francisco detective agency. That's for Sam Spade and Miles Archer. The two men are partners, but Sam doesn't like Miles much. A knockout, who goes by the name of Miss Wanderly, walks into their office; and by that night everything's changed. Miles is dead. And so is a man named Floyd Thursby. It seems Miss Wanderly is surrounded by dangerous men. There's Joel Cairo, who uses gardenia-scented calling cards. There's Kasper Gutman, with his enormous girth and feigned civility. Her only hope of protection comes from Sam, who is suspected by the police of one or the other murder. More murders are yet to come.
Behind the locked doors of a mental institution resides crooked politico Judge Drake (Herbert Heyes), free from prosecution so long as he pretends to be crazy. To get the goods on Drake, private detective Ross Stewart has himself committed to the asylum as a patient. Meanwhile, reporter Kathy Lawrence (Lucille Bremer), posing as Stewart's wife, acts as his liaison to the outside world.
A retired ex-cop and private detective gets mixed up in murder when he is asked to deliver blackmail money and walks into a 20 year old case involving the mysterious disappearance of an actress' former husband.
A grifter - deported and then returning to the US -- who can't find a job finally secures work at a low-rent detective agency. He quickly gets involved with a woman with ties to a murder.
Skillfully framed by an unknown enemy for the murder of a priest, wanted vigilante MacManus brothers Murphy and Connor must come out of hiding on a sheep farm in Ireland to fight for justice in Boston.
Johnnie Hill plays Velvet Smooth in this soft-core crime meller. The slinky Ms. Smooth is head of a private detective agency, specializing in protecting the unprotectable. Her current client is in deep with a murderous numbers racket. So Velvet Smooth goes undercover (and occasionally under covers) to smash the ring. An "R" rating hardly covers it.
A thriller about an IRA gunman who draws an American family into the crossfire of terrorism. Frankie McGuire is one of the IRA's deadliest assassins. But when he is sent to the U.S. to buy weapons, Frankie is housed with the family of Tom O'Meara, a New York cop who knows nothing about Frankie's real identity. Their surprising friendship, and Tom's growing suspicions, force Frankie to choose between the promise of peace or a lifetime of murder.
A lovely dame with dangerous lies employs the services of a private detective, who is quickly caught up in the mystery and intrigue of a statuette known as the Maltese Falcon.
Johnny Doyle escapes a violent past in Ireland to lie low in London, until his former mentor Flynn breaks out of Brixton Prison...
Los Angeles private-eye Philip Marlowe is trying to locate the brother of his new client, a woman named Orfamay Quest. The trail leads to two men who deny any knowledge of the brother's existence. Both are soon killed by an ice pick, so Marlowe deduces that there's much more to this than a simple missing-person case. Marlowe's path crosses that of a blackmailed movie star, Mavis Wald, and her friend, exotic dancer Delores. A mobster sends karate expert Winslow Wong to bust up Marlowe's office and warn him off the case, while Lieutenant French also cautions the detective to stay out of the police's way.
Irish Republican Army member Fergus (Stephen Rea) forms an unexpected bond with Jody (Forest Whitaker), a kidnapped British soldier in his custody, despite the warnings of fellow IRA members Jude (Miranda Richardson) and Maguire (Adrian Dunbar). Jody makes Fergus promise he'll visit his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson), in London, and when Fergus flees to the city, he seeks her out. Hounded by his former IRA colleagues, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the enigmatic, and surprising, Dil.
This sequel to the classic Chinatown finds private detective Jake Gittes still haunted from the events of the first film. Hired by a man to investigate his wife's infidelities, Jake once again finds himself involved in a complicated plot involving murder, oil, and even some ghosts from his past.
Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock hires Marlowe to find an old rare coin, the Brasher Doubloon, that belonged in her deceased husband's collection. Mrs. Murdock insists that her son's wife has stolen the coin. Marlowe begins investigating, but quickly finds himself entangled in a series of unexplained murders.
In a broken city rife with injustice, ex-cop Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) seeks redemption and revenge after being double-crossed and then framed by its most powerful figure, the mayor (Russell Crowe). Billy's relentless pursuit of justice, matched only by his streetwise toughness, makes him an unstoppable force - and the mayor's worst nightmare.
Ford "Mr. Rock n' Roll Detective" Fairlane is experiencing problems, and it's not with the opposite sex. One of them is that all the rock stars pay him with drum sticks, koala bears, food processors and bicycle shorts. Another one of them is that all his employers that want him to find a girl named Zuzu Petals get killed. Why didn't he become a fisherman's detective instead?
Cool black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.
Spoofing the entire 1940s detective genre, and his own performances as a bumbling private detective, Peter Falk plays Lou Pekinpaugh, a San Francisco private detective accused of murdering his partner at the instigation of his mistress, the partner's wife, Georgia Merkle.
A young college student is found stabbed to death,and private detective Vares life takes an interesting turn when the girls family asks him to investigate the case.
German Areta (Alfredo Landa) "The Louse", is an ex-cop detective with a tiny office in a part of Madrid going to seed - a scenario inspired by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), to whom Crack is dedicated. Areta is trying to track down a young woman who has basically disappeared into the world of high-class courtesans in the city, and he is told to lay off the search by some powerful types who do not want any negative publicity. Unwilling to leave it at that, Areta' s enemies decide to bring home the message in an unsavory manner, through some nasty business with his girlfriend's daughter. Enraged at their tactics, Areta puts his manhunt into high gear and heads off to New York City to track down the bad guys. In another tip of the hat to Dashiell Hammett the "look and feel" of the film evokes the 1930s mystery movies.
The complicated life and controversial suicide of George Reeves is investigated by a fictional private detective who finds that there are reasons to suspect that Reeves may not have killed himself after all. The detective also finds that there is a little of George Reeves in himself, and maybe, each of us.
Private eye Mike Shayne encounters a large amount of trouble while attempting to guard a murder witness.
In 1950, a young woman named Manikyam was found dead in the village of Paleri. Around 52 years later, Haridas, a private investigator, tries to unravel the truth about her death.
A private eye (Adele Mara) and her sidekick solve the case of a dead client.
Browning is a PI with a bad cold, who's sent to investigate a case by a mysterious client. He stumbles across the body of a young woman and is stabbed to death, and when he wakes up in heaven, they tell him he's "marginal material," and they can only decide on his final destination through one last assignment: to go back and solve his own murder. As a dog. A cute fluffy little dog (Benji). Undaunted, Browning begins to investigate the case as best he can around his canine disabilities (dialing the phone presents a special challenge) to solve the murders, save the girl, and see justice done.
This film noir tends to stay within very conventional plot lines, as the narration by the main protagonist, private detective Eugene Tarpon Jean-François Balmer, recites a dreary litany of how he wanted to chuck his profession until an attractive woman shows up asking him to investigate the murder of her roommate, a porno star. Soon Tarpon is up to his neck in trouble: the police, gangsters, and the victim's lover are all out to get him.
The story of former UVF member Alistair Little. Twenty-five years after Little killed Joe Griffen's brother, the media arrange an auspicious meeting between the two.
A small, seemingly innocuous plastic reel of film leads surveillance specialist Tom Welles down an increasingly dark and frightening path. With the help of the streetwise Max, he relentlessly follows a bizarre trail of evidence to determine the fate of a complete stranger. As his work turns into obsession, he drifts farther and farther away from his wife, family and simple life as a small-town PI.
In one long Friday evening, Takeshi Miyata (Yasuhi Nakamura), a straight-arrow businessman, will encounter a number of people (some only fleetingly) who have intertwining fates. The plot of the film is presented in succession first from the point of view of Maki Kuwata (Reika Kirishima), a young woman disappointed in love, then from Takeshi's point of view, then of his friend, Yusuke Kanda (Sō Yamanaka), a private detective, then of Takeshi's former girlfriend, Ayumi Kurata (Yuka Itaya), then of a wannabe-tough Yakuza, Asai (Kisuke Yamashita).
Recently paroled from prison, legendary burglar "Doc" Riedenschneider, with funding from Alonzo Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, gathers a small group of veteran criminals together in the Midwest for a big jewel heist.
Paul Manderley, eccentric historian, and his wife, descendant of the Borgias, live in an isolated castle-like mansion in the Mojave Desert. When a guest suddenly collapses, Charlie Chan is invited to stay. As the standard mystery-mansion props come into play, and all means of outside communication are sabotaged, it becomes evident that one of the inhabitants has access to poisons and is prepared to use them...
'Toon star Roger is worried that his wife Jessica is playing pattycake with someone else, so the studio hires detective Eddie Valiant to snoop on her. But the stakes are quickly raised when Marvin Acme is found dead and Roger is the prime suspect.
Jack Higgins' straightforward thriller about a guilt-ridden IRA bomber forced into "one last job"
Sach (Huntz Hall) just lost his job as an assistant to a private detective, but he wasn't paid. Slip (Leo Gorcey) goes with him down to the detective's office to demand payment, but finds the office empty. A woman enters the office and mistakes Slip for the detective and convinces him to take on a case to find her sister after offering a $50 retainer.
An elderly ex-serviceman and widower looks to avenge his best friend's murder by doling out his own form of justice.
An ex-cop is suspected of murder after he is found with a dead woman. The private detective is on the run -- attempting to prove his innocence.
Years after walking away from her past as a teenage private eye, Veronica Mars gets pulled back to her hometown - just in time for her high school reunion - in order to help her old flame Logan Echolls, who's embroiled in a murder mystery.
The classic Raymond Chandler tale retold with Mitchum taking over the Bogart role.
An ex-police officer operating a private detective business comes face to face with a syndicate-backed dope ring.
A safe designer is forced to assist jewel thieves by opening a safe for them. He is then accused of the crime after he loses his memory and forgets the actual details of the theft. With the help of his wife, he tries to piece together the past and clear his name.
A private detective (Willard Parker) falls for the girlfriend (Allison Hayes) of a racketeer whom he believes has targeted him for death.
Down and out private detective is hired to catch a woman who dresses like Catwoman while committing robberies.
Private detective Ture Sventon is visited by his friend Mr. Omar of the Arabic desert. Sventon decides to travel with Mr. Omar on his flying carpet to Paris. However, Sventon almost exclusively lives on cream puffs, and to transport these across the continent, he needs a portable fridge. He pays a visit to Stockholms foremost fridge inventor and are introduced to a new fridge which shrinks and deshrinks the food. The inventor is afraid his new invention will be stolen, and thus Sventon brings it to Paris where it gets stolen.
Crowder is a an unethical private detective in pursuit of a gangster who's after embezzled money.
In Ireland, American lawyer Ingrid Jessner and her activist partner, Paul Sullivan, struggle to uncover atrocities committed by the British government against the Northern Irish during the "Troubles." But when Sullivan is assassinated in the streets, Jessner teams up with Peter Kerrigan, a British investigator acting against the will of his own government, and struggles to uncover a conspiracy that may even implicate one of Kerrigan's colleagues.
The film revolves around the exploits of a detective agency in Hong Kong called Mannix Private Detective Agency. It is headed by private detective Wong Yeuk Sze (Michael Hui) with his emotionally drained assistant Puffy (Ricky Hui). Meanwhile, Lee Kwok Kit (Samuel Hui), a kung fu expert, who works at a Vitasoy plant factory and spends most of the time doing kung fu tricks to impress a girl, ultimately loses his job. Seeking to find another line of work, Lee attempts to joins Wong's detective agency. Despite Lee's impression with his kung fu talent which involves his snatching trick, Wong was not impressed. Then, as it appears that Lee would not get the job, Wong discovers that his wallet was missing and was presumed stolen by one bystander who bumped into them. Lee intercepts him and recovers the wallet, thus impressed Wong to hire him for the job.
Determined, independent Bridie Quilty comes of age in 1944 Ireland thinking all Englishmen are devils. Her desire to join the IRA meets no encouragement, but a German spy finds her easy to recruit. We next find her working in a pub near a British military prison, using her sex appeal in the service of the enemy. But chance puts a really vital secret into her hands, leading to a chase involving Bridie, a British officer who's fallen for her, a German agent unknown to them both, and the police...paralleled by Bridie's own internal conflicts.
In 1950s Ireland and New York, young Ellis Lacey has to choose between two men and two countries.
A thriller centered on a con artist, his wife, and a stranger who try to flee a foreign country after one of them is caught up in the murder of a private detective.
Eddie Durkan, the self-proclaimed leader of the 'Bucks is dreading spending another summer bored out of his skull. Ireland has qualified for the Euros in Poland, but with no money and apathetic mates, the task falls to Eddie to get them out of Castletown and onto the road in search of football and the craic.
Millionaire sportsman Hiram Brighton hires gumshoe Michael Shayne to keep his spoiled daughter Phyllis away from racetrack betting windows and roulette wheels. After Phyllis slips away and continues her compulsive gambling, Shayne fakes the murder of her gambler boyfriend, who is also romancing the daughter of casino owner Benny Gordon, in order to frighten her. When the tout really ends up murdered, Shayne and Phyllis' Aunt Olivia, an avid reader of murder mysteries, both try to find the identity of the killer.
The movie starts at the 1998 bomb attack by the Real IRA at Omagh, Northern Ireland. The attack killed 31 people. Michael Gallagher one of the relatives of the victims starts an examination to bring the people responsible to court.
Two young couples backpacking through Ireland discover that one of Ireland's most famous legends is a terrifying reality.
In the second screen version of The Maltese Falcon, a detective is caught between a lying seductress and a lady jewel thief.
Forced by her mean-spirited father, Lord Chief Justice James O'Brien (Hobart Bosworth), to marry a man she doesn't love, Connaught O'Brien (June Collyer) gives up hope of ever with her true love, Dermot McDermot (Larry Kent). After her father dies and a hunted rebel leader (Victor McLaglen) returns to town, however, Connaught finds a renewed hope that the tides of oppression will shift and she might again find happiness. This silent romantic drama, set in Ireland, is the first film in which a then-unknown John Wayne is clearly visible.

© Valossa 2015–2024