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GREAT FELLA (MR SCORSESE)

  MR SCORSESE When asked which famous people, living or dead, I would invite to a fantast dinner party, Martin Scorsese's name always comes up first. For film buffs, Scorsese a fascinating interview. A natural storyteller and teacher, few directors can match his breadth of knowledge about cinema nor his unbridled enthusiasm for the artform. The New Yorker has such a huge reservoir of anecdotes from his experiences of the film industry, he's also incapable of giving a boring interview. As if to underscore that point, filmmaker Rebecca Miller has released a five part documentary for Apple TV that tells the director's story with the help of Scorsese, his family and long time friends. These include friends and collaborators such as Robert de Niro, Leonardo diCaprio, Thelma Schoonmaker, Robbie Robertson, Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, Jodie Foster, Isabella Rossellini, Spike Lee, Margot Robbie, Daniel Day Lewis, Sharon Stone, Paul Schrader, Cate Blanchett, Ari Aster, Mick Jag...
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BLAME GAME (ALL HER FAULT & FILM CLUB, S1)

  ALL HER FAULT  Have you ever seen a show where one actor stands out in a sea of mediocrity? Welcome to Peacock's 'All Her Fault,' airing in the UK and Ireland on Sky Atlantic and available on NowTV and other Sky streaming services. It's a thriller minus thrills, where Michael Pena just acts everybody else off the screen and appears to have been catapulted into the wrong show. Adapted from  Irish novelist Andrea Mara's 2021 book,  it's one of those oh so serious mysteries where bad things happen to whiney, not very nice wealthy people. Sarah Snook plays Marissa Irvine, a wealth manager juggling the demands of a high powered job in finance with being a mum. Married to Jake Lacy's commodities trader Peter, she arrives at a house that she's never been to before to collect her five year old son, Duke McCloud's Milo from a playdate.  However the occupant of the house, Linda Cropper's Esther Bauer appears to know nothing about the playdate and when sh...
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THE HUNGRY GHOST (BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER)

   BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER  When you think of movies about gambling, you tend to think of films like ' The Sting ,' ' The Cooler ,' ' Rounders ' or ' Casino '. With the exception of ' Croupier ,' a lot of these tend to be set in cities like New York or Las Vegas. Now ' All Quiet On The Western Front ' and ' Conclave ' director Edward Berger has given the genre a distinctive Asian flavour. The glitzy Chinese region of Macau is the setting for the German director's darkly comic psychological thriller 'Ballad of A Small Player' -  an adaptation of English author Lawrence Osbourne's 2014 novel . Starring Colin Farrell, the Dubliner plays an Irish conman posing as an Anglo Irish Lord living the high life in luxury hotels and casinos. While his real name is Brendan Reilly, he adopts the persona of a washed up peer called Lord Doyle who is on an epic losing streak in Macau's casinos. Reilly is up to his eyeballs in d...
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ART AND HEAD (THE CHORAL & MR BURTON)

  THE CHORAL There's something wonderful about sitting down to watch another Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner collaboration. Over the years, they have worked together on six productions of Bennett's plays, adapting three of them for the big screen - ' The Madness of King George ,' ' The History Boys ' and ' The Lady In The Van '. So it's good to see them bringing an original story to the screen, with the World War One era tale 'The Choral'. Set in the small Yorkshire town of Ramsden, the film follows the struggles of a local choral society struggling to find tenors because most of their young men have volunteered to fight in the war. The mainstays of the choral society are Alun Armstrong's undertaker Mr Trickett, Mark Addy's photographer Mr Fyton, Ron Cook's local vicar and Roger Allam's local mill owner and alderman Bernard Duxbury. Not long into the film, the four man committee are sent into a flap when their choirmaster als...
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THROUGH THE BARRICADES (TRESPASSES & THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH)

TRESPASSES Adaptations of popular novels for the big or small screen are tricky. Readers build a certain picture of the story in their minds and there's a real risk your interpretation can alienate them. But it certainly helps to have the original author involved in the production. Channel 4  would seem to have an advantage, therefore, for its Northern Ireland Troubles drama 'Trespasses' whose author  Louise Kennedy  is onboard as an executive producer. Adapted for the screen by  Ailbhe Keogan , the four part miniseries tells the story of a doomed love affair between a Catholic primary schoolteacher and an unconventional Protestant lawyer in early 1970s Belfast. Lola Petticrew 's Cushla lives with her alcoholic mum,  Gillian Anderson 's Gina Lavery while the city wriggles under the grip of a bitter sectarian conflict that is fuelled by political instability. The  IRA, INLA, UDA and UVF  are engaged in a war that also involves the British Army and the...
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THE APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE (FRANKENSTEIN & ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE)

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...
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AMERICAN TROUBADOUR (SPRINGSTEEN - DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE & THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND)

  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...
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