Anthony Byrne

Sharp suits, violence and black humour set the terms in MobLand (2025), where Tom Hardy’s fixer gives us a reason to stay. The gangster business is familiar, but Hardy makes it entertaining. Anthony Byrne is well suited to this material, with his interest in compromised leads and carefully composed frames. We rate his visual discipline, though the drama needs more than a persuasive leading actor.

His route into long-form drama ran from the features Short Order (2005) and How About You (2007) to television, including Love/Hate (2010). On Peaky Blinders (2019–2022), he directed 12 episodes across the fifth and sixth series. The visual consistency of that run is a strength. It is a better place to assess his habits than a programme where he shares the directing with several others.

Byrne favours a small number of purposeful shots and works scenes out with actors rather than relying on extensive storyboards. That leaves room for performance within those controlled pictures, a useful combination. His collaborators include cinematographer Si Bell and Natalie Dormer, with whom he co-wrote In Darkness (2018). Sound and shadow create effective suspense in that thriller. The increasingly convoluted plotting is less assured.

MobLand brings a different difficulty: separating one director’s work from a programme made by several. Byrne shares directing duties with Guy Ritchie, Daniel Syrkin and Lawrence Gough, so we cannot attribute every stalled scene to him. We grew impatient when the pace dropped and the weaker supporting characters had too little to offer. Hardy remained good company, but relying on him to carry those stretches made the thin writing harder to overlook. For a fuller view of Byrne’s direction, start with his two series of Peaky Blinders; choose MobLand chiefly for Hardy, with patience for the slow start.