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SLOW HORSES, S1 If you were a BBC, ITV or Channel 4 drama commissioner, you're probably cursing your luck. Long before Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ came on the scene, you would had the pick of the crop when commissioning television scripts. Great writers like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, Jimmy McGovern, Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and Alan Plater all made their name on terrestrial television and delivered stunning work. Huge audiences tuned in for adaptations of Robert Graves' 'I Claudius,' Anthony Trollope's 'The Barchester Chronicles' or John Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. However the shift in the British television landscape brought about by streaming has changed all that. Nowhere is that better illustrated than with a show like 'Slow Horses' winding up on Apple TV+. An adaptation of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' novels, Will Smith's spy series has all the ha...

BLUE LIGHTS, S3 With a  BAFTA in the bag  and an international following, you can see why ' Blue Lights ' returned to our screens this September with one hell of a swagger. Now in its third series, audiences have built up a real affection for the show's characters and they are really invested in their ups and downs. They've just about forgiven the show's creators  Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson  for getting rid of its most popular character in the first series,  Richard Dormer's Gerry Cliff . That series focused on the murky world of  Belfast drug dealers  operating under a  dissident Irish republican  flag of convenience, while cutting deals with  military intelligence puppet masters  who permitted a flow of drugs into upper middle and working class communities. Series Two  concentrated on a turf war on a loyalist housing estate that was also linked to the drugs trade. Patterson and Lawn's third series takes it a step further,...

  ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER From ' Hard Eight ' to ' Punch Drunk Love ,' ' There Will Be Blood ' to ' Licorice Pizza ,' Paul Thomas Anderson has built one of the most impressive CVs in American cinema over the last 29 years. Anderson's movies are so distinctive in style and so rich psychologically, you can see why actors from Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore to Daniel Day Lewis, Emily Watson and Joaquin Phoenix have all been drawn to him. His latest movie 'One Battle After Another' sees him finally collaborate with Leonardo DiCaprio. But it also reunites him with Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. 'One Battle After Another' is a refreshingly original tale of Californian left wing rebels battling right wing extremists in the US establishment. Inevitably, given the extreme polarisation of contemporary US politics, it's a movie that will very much be interpreted as a film of its time. But it is also a bravura demonst...

  A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE During the Cold War there was no shortage of movies and TV dramas dealing with the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. From Stanley Kramer's ' On the Beach ' in 1959 with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardiner and Fred Astaire to Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller ' Fail Safe ' with Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Dan O'Herlihy to Nicholas Meyer's 1983 miniseries ' The Day After ' with Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenburg, filmmakers and screenwriters explored the horror of nuclear warfare from the perspective of military personnel or ordinary citizens. ' Threads ' in 1984 with Reece Dinsdale and Karen Meagher on BBC2 was a particularly graphic and sobering account of how a regional English city like Sheffield would fare. Others took a slightly different approach, with the director Stanley Kubrick deploying satire in 1964 to still drive home the horror in ' Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Lov...

  TASK Four years after giving us the superb ' Mare of Easttown ,' screenwriter Brad Inglesby has delivered another HBO miniseries with fully fleshed out characters struggling to do the right thing. Set once again in Pennsylvania, 'Task' features Mark Ruffalo as a former Catholic priest turned FBI agent who is recalled to field duty after spending his time at recruitment fairs in colleges. Tom Brandis, however, is nursing his own demons. He's a widower with a drink problem who is estranged from his adopted son, Andrew Russell's Ethan who is serving time in jail as he waits to be tried for murder. In spite of his messy family life, Tom is asked by his no nonsense FBI boss, Martha Plimpton's Kathleen McGinty to head up a hunt for a missing young boy, Ben Doherty's Sam who has disappeared after his drug dealing parents are gunned down in a stash house. The shooting, however, has been a botched robbery, with Tom Pelphrey's garbage collector Robbie Prende...

  THE LOST BUS Few filmmakers today are better at taking audiences into the eye of the storm than Paul Greengrass. Whether it's the terror that unfolded on  the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday , in the  skies of the United States on 9/11  or on the seas  at the hands of Somali pirates  or if it's simply  the thrill of the hunt  in the  Bourne spy movies , Greengrass is probably the best at conjuring up authentic, high octane action sequences. So it's with some glee that audiences will no doubt view his new collaboration with Matthew McConaghey and America Ferrera in a movie about the 2018 Camp Fire that raged through Butte County in northern California - one of the deadliest wildfires in the history of the state. 'The Lost Bus' is an account of how, against all the odds, bus driver Kevin McKay ferried 22 elementary schoolchildren and their teacher through some of the worst wildfires California had ever seen. Working from a screenplay by Gre...