Wallander (Faceless Killers / The Man Who Smiled / The Fifth Woman) - [Cover Art May Vary]

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Product Description ------------------- The award-winning drama returns with Kenneth Branagh as Wallander in the next set of thrilling tales set in the beautiful landscape of southern Sweden! Based on the novels by Henning Mankell, these stories follow Kurt Wallander, a sensitive but brilliant detective – a man who takes each murder case he works on personally and will stop at nothing in his search for the truth, even at the expense of his and his family life. Beautifully filmed, Wallander is a compelling series featuring an extremely likeable and entirely believable character and bold, powerful stories. .com ---- Fans of crime dramas, and especially of the moody genre of Swedish noir--the Stieg Larsson books and films, for example--will not want to miss the lush, well-made Wallander, a British remake of a hugely popular Swedish TV series. Wallander resembles many British crime dramas in its thoughtful, complex plotting and focus on sense of place, but it's just different enough to get under the viewer's skin. The Swedish landscape is beautiful and stark, inviting and bewildering. And somehow the rough-hewn beauty of the country infuses each of Wallander's characters with a brooding, deliberate, and slightly offbeat charm. Kenneth Branagh plays Kurt Wallander, a moody detective whose personal life contains as many messy mysteries as his work does. As season two opens, in the episode titled "Faceless Killers," Wallander is drawn into an especially grisly and seemingly random slaying of an elderly farm couple. Without much to go on other than the dying wife's last (and possibly misheard) word, Wallander is soon delving into the secret life of the dead man. The next two episodes, "The Man Who Smiled," about the deaths of two friends of Wallander's, and "The Fifth Woman," about a possible serial killer, build upon the events in the first episode. Through it all, Branagh's acting and character arc are believable, human, and sympathetic even when what Wallander does and says can be cringe-worthy. Wallander's daughter is dating a South Asian man she adores, and Wallander can't quite give his stamp of approval. Wallander struggles with addiction, rather badly. Yet Branagh instills the character with relatable emotion and conflict that make watching Wallander very rewarding. The cast is refreshingly small, including the appealing Sarah Smart as Anne-Britt Hoglund, Wallander's long-suffering partner, and Jeany Spark as Wallander's prickly but loving daughter, Linda. Fans of British and Swedish mysteries, and any well-written, -directed, and -acted crime series, won't want to miss this season of Wallander. --A.T. Hurley