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FRANKENSTEIN As of October 2025, there had been 423 movies featuring some version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 204 short films, 78 TV series and 287 episodes of TV shows also featured the creature and it's easy to understand why. Mary Shelley's tale is an Icarus story. It's about man striving to be God, flying too close to the sun and then crashing. It's about a surgeon creating life and the consequences of what happens when he rejects his creation. It's a cautionary tale too about scientific ambition giving way to disappointment and regret long before we had the real life example of ' Oppenheimer '. The first movie of Shelley's story was  J Searle Dawley's 1910 silent film  with Augustus Phillips and Charles Ogle. James Whale's  1931 Universal Pictures adaptation with Boris Karloff  as The Creature was arguably the most influential, conjuring up the image of a square headed creature that would dominate screen depictions and Halloween cost...

  SPRINGSTEEN - DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Rock biopics should be a guaranteed hit if they're any way half decent - bringing ready made audiences into cinemas. However they can also be formulaic and can look like obvious awards grabs by actors desperate to impress audiences with their impersonation of famous faces. Scott Cooper's 'Springsteen - Deliver Me From Nowhere' stands out, though, from the pack with its focus on the influences that shaped Bruce Springsteen's most daring album 'Nebraska' and also because of its honest depiction of the star's mental health. Jeremy Allen White plays the New Jersey rock icon - an interesting piece of casting because he looks nothing like Bruce. However you quickly forget that as the star of ' The Bear ' captures his distinctive gait, his rasping voice, his unique stance at a microphone, his onstage energy and even the way he tightens his jaw as he belts out songs. Unlike Timothee Chalamet's recent foray into...

   SLOW HORSES, S5 If you were to ask people to name an Apple TV show, the chances are that those who know the streaming service's output would probably say ' Ted Lasso ' or ' Slow Horses '. Outside of  the football sitcom , the  London spy series  is the other jewel in Apple TV's crown - having mopped up BAFTA, Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nominations since first landing on our screens on April Fool's Day, 2022. Critics adore the espionage series which has built up a cult following around the world with its cynical humour and rebellious spirit. In a big investment in English screenwriter  Will Smith's adaptation of Mick Herron's spy novels , the producers have for some years shot its series back to back. This ensures that as soon as one series airs, the next is already in the can and fans don't have to wait more than a year for the next instalment. 2025's story begins in typical 'Slow Horses' fashion with a big action set piece. I...

SLOW HORSES, S4 After three adventures where they have bested agents  inside and outside British intelligence , the team from Slough House face their biggest challenge yet in Series Four. 'Slow Horses' begins its fourth series in typically shocking fashion, with an explosion ripping through London as a suicide bomber drives into the Westacres Shopping Mall. The man responsible is Zachary Hart's Robert Winters, with a pre-recorded video published of him admitting the attack. As armed police break into his flat to find forensic evidence linking him to the bombing, a booby trap device lies in wait and detonates, killing three officers. With a new out of his depth boss at the head of MI5, James Callis' Claude Whelan, his deputy Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner feels the heat about why the intelligence services were caught off guard. Meanwhile Jack Lowden's Slough House operative River Cartwright confides in Rosalind Eleazar's colleague Louisa Guy that he ...

SLOW HORSES, S3 We know the drill by now. Each season of 'Slow Horses' begins with a big, pulsating set piece. But this time around it's not occurring in Blighty but in Istanbul where Sope Dirisu's head of security at the UK Embassy Sean Donovan is spying on Katherine Waterston's MI5 agent Alison Dunn. She is suspected of trying to leak information that could be highly damaging to British intelligence. The only problem is Sean and Alison are also lovers and when she discovers he is spying on her a cat and mouse game around Istanbul ensues as he tries to intercept a stolen document she is going to pass on to a mystery man. Losing him during the chase at dusk, Sean eventually catches up with where she is at an empty football stadium, only to discover Alison has been thrown off the building. A year later, Sean resurfaces in London at an AA meeting that Saskia Reeves' Slough House office administrator Catherine Standish attends regularly. Posing as an alcoholic name...

SLOW HORSES, S2 Having avoided shouldering the blame for a false flag operation that went badly wrong in the show's inaugural season, Apple TV's 'Slow Horses' are back for more adventures. However this time it isn't the far right the gang of MI5 screw ups in Slough House have to worry about. Season Two finds Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb and his gang of MI5 rejects encountering dodgy Russians after the suspicious death of a former disgraced comrade, Phil Davis' Richard Bough. The victim dies while following a man who is acting suspiciously outside his shop. In fact, the incident is of sufficient concern to Lamb that he combs video footage of Bough's last movements and even searches the bus he made his final journey in. There Lamb finds Bough's mobile with a message 'Cicada' on it, prompting him to get Jack Lowden's River Cartwright and the rest of the team to dig deeper. Independent of Lamb's operation, two of the team Dustin Demri-Burns...