A Thousand Blows (on Disney +): the creator of Peaky Blinders still hits right (critic)

Certainly, Steven Knight likes the stories of old English gangs! While waiting for the film Peaky Blinders, it brings us back to the 19th century, in a filthy London where a multitude of broken gules intersect. Practising and bewitching.

Goodbye Birmingham, Hello London. New historical saga for the creator of Peaky Blinders. And new punch in the face with A Thousand BlowsVisceral story that brings us back to the teeming and suffocating streets in London in the 1880s, a splendid period of the British Empire, where the English capital was more or less the center of the world.

Hezekiah Moscow and his friend Alec arrive from Jamaica colonized to try a better life in the kingdom of His Majesty Victoria. They will quickly be disillusioned, swallowed by the East End, this filthy district where emigrants end. Building on their boxing skills, they will succeed in making a small place in the city, supported by the local “queen”: Mary Carr, dreaded patron of “Forty Elephants”, a female gang of thieves that are not cold in the eyes.

After the bad boys Peaky Blinders,, Steven Knight So puts crime in the feminine and finds his obsessions of the broken mouths, these left behind the sidelines of society, well obliged to fight to survive. Its historical series – Yes, these people really existed! – Sometimes has operetta appearance where the ring is a scene on which each stroke worn seems to seal a destiny.

In the alleys of the East London, muffled by the smoke of the factories and the stench, each plan breathes the time. The historical reconstruction is subjugating and the atmosphere is as dense as the darkness of the characters who cross it. The heart of the series is Mary Carr, embodied with a fierce intensity by the too little known Erin Doherty. Faced with the impressive Stephen Grahammore animal than ever, the ex-princese Anne de The Crown is the epicenter of this criminal and social epic. His ascent, brutal and inexorable, nourishes the chronicle of Knight, who, faithful to his style, plunges us into a fascinating whirlwind of violence. With A Thousand Blowsthe English scriptwriter is still hitting right. His new fresco is exciting and captures the essence of an era when the struggle for existence devoured everything in its path.

In Thousand Blows, in 6 episodes, to see in France on Disney Plus since February 21, 2025