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  DEATH BY LIGHTNING Tony Blair famously felt the hand of history on his shoulder but what do you do when you discover a brain of history inside a jar? Mike Makowsky's four part Netflix drama 'Death By Lightning' begins in 1969 with the discovery of the brain of Matthew Macfadyen's Charles J Guiteau inside a jar in a warehouse. Those who discover it ask: "Who the hell is Charles Guiteau?"  And well they may ask because unlike John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald (whether you believe he shot JFK or not), he's become the forgotten assassin of a forgotten US President. Makoswky's drama sets out to rectify that with the parallel tales of the assassin and the President he shot, Michael Shannon's James A Garfield. It's a story of political backstabbing and empire building in the post Civil War 1880s Republican Party. But it's also a story about a desperate, unhinged man trying and struggling to make his mark in society. Shannon's Garfield i...

  NI SCREEN/BBCNI GREEN LIT SHORTS 2025 Short films provide an essential platform for emerging filmmaking talent. They test directors and writers,' ability to tell a compelling story on a tight budget and an even tighter running time. Directors get valuable experience working with experienced actors and crew. More importantly, short gilms serve as an effective calling cards for directors trying to catch the eye of film and TV  producers. Like Fis Eireann, RTE and Virgin Media in the Irish Republic, NI Screen and BBC Northern Ireland have made full use of short films as a means of developing emerging talent. And in the run-up to Christmas, there's a chance on the BBC iPlayer to see the work of three filmmakers under NI Screen and BBC Northern Ireland's GREEN LIT initiative. First up is Oisin Kearney's 'Helpless' starring 'Sex Education' actor George Robinson as Cillian, a former paramedic confined to a wheelchair who suspects a neighbour he has a crush on...

  CHANGING ENDS, S3 November was one hell of a month for Alan Carr. At the start of the month, the comedian  won the first series of BBC1's 'The Celebrity Traitors'  and £87,500 for his chosen charity, Neuroblastoma UK after duping his fellow contestants. Dismissed as an unlikely traitor, he deceived most of his fellow contestants into believing he couldn't be one and entertained the nation by initially sweating profusely as he struggled befire betraying several of them. If that wasn't enough, the third series of  his semi-autobiographical sitcom 'Changing Ends'  has hit our screens and the great news is that it's as delightful as ever. By far the funniest sitcom ITV has ever produced, the show  ended its second season  with Alan's football manager dad, Shaun Dooley's Graham steering his East Midlands side, Northampton Town to promotion and also defending his son's honour. Oliver Savell's Alan continued to awkwardly navigate his pre-teen ...

  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...

  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...

   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...