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Having given us earlier this year its take on the murders carried out in 1985 by Jeremy Bamber in  'White House Farm' , ITV is back again with a drama that wades through horrific, real life crime. 'Des,' written by Luke Neal and Kelly Jones, focuses on the confession of one of Britain's most infamous serial killers, Dennis Nilsen in 1983. Not so much a whodunnit but more of a how many did he kill, it features David Tennant as the Aberdeenshire born murderer and pits him against Daniel Mays' Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay. At the start of director Lewis Arnold's gripping three part miniseries, Jay is going through a painful marriage breakdown. It is a rare glimpse of Jay's life outside the police as soon he and Barry Ward's Detective Inspector Steve McCusker are responding to reports of the discovery of human remains in a drain by Tony Watt's Dyno Rod employee Michael Crattan. Jay and McCusker wait for Nilson to return home from work and on

It either takes a lot of guts or a misplaced confidence to take a character from another writer's most celebrated work and build a drama around them. But that is what Ryan Murphy sets out to do with 'Ratched' - a Netflix series constructed around Ken Kesey's manipulative nurse in 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. Mildred Ratched was memorably played by Louise Fletcher in an Academy Award winning performance opposite Jack Nicholson in Milos Forman's  Oscar garlanded 1975 movie of Kesey's novel. Regarded as one of cinema's nastiest villains, Murphy has turned to Sarah Paulson to take on the role for his Netflix TV prequel. Fans of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' will be surprised that Forman's film does not really influence Murphy's series. The realism of Forman's comedy drama is sacrificed for the high camp of classic Hollywood melodrama and film noir. Murphy and his fellow directors Michael Uppendahl, Nelson Cragg, Jes

  With the exception of 'The Waltons,' most movies and TV series set in the Appalachians tend to be savage affairs. Most depict the people of the region as hard, God fearing folk, often wrestling with lust and a thirst for bloody revenge. Antonio Campos' adaptation of Douglas Ray Pollock's 2011 debut novel 'The Devil All The Time' is no different. Set in southern Ohio and west Virginia, its main characters have twisted mores and are tormented by their faith. The movie begins with a focus on Bill Skarsgard's Willard Russell, a resident of Coal Creek in West Virginia, returning home from the horrors of the Second World War. As he heads home to his family, a stop off in southern Ohio results in him falling for Haley Bennett's sweet natured diner waitress Charlotte Willoughby. Willard marries Charlotte despite attempts by his devout churchgoing mother, Kristin Griffith's Emma Russell to engineer a relationship with a fellow worshipper. He moves instead t

If there has been one trend in British television during 2020, it has been the rise of the frank 35 minute miniseries. Three shows by female writers have mesmerised audiences with pacy dramas that all have a brutally honest focus on 21st Century sex and relationships. First up was BBC3 and Hulu's version of Sally Rooney's ' Normal People ' - a sexually explicit examination of a romance between two damaged souls. Then Michaela Coel tackled the consequences of rape and the issue of sexual consent in ' I May Destroy You ,' a hard hitting miniseries for the Tinder generation on BBC3 and HBO. Now Sky Atlantic have gotten in on the act, with Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble's meta comedy drama 'I Hate Suzie' which dealscwith the downward career spiral of a minor celebrity. The character in question, Suzie Pickles found fame as a kid singing on a TV talent contest. And as the show gets underway, it is clear that Suzie is a fictional reworking of Piper's ow

Never has a film had so much riding on its success. Billed by some in the film industry as the blockbuster to save cinema, Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet' is the first major movie to be released in picture houses five, six months into a pandemic that initially shut them all down. Studios have been watching closely how the film performs during its rollout across a number of territories and wondering if it will prove to be enough of a draw for audiences nervous about the Covid filmgoing experience. It looks so but time will tell just how successful it has been. The weight of expectation for any Nolan film is always huge. But 'Tenet' is trying to meet those expectations in the context of a radically changed cinemagoing experience. Audiences must now don face masks, use hand gel and there are reduced capacities in each theatre because of the requirements for physical distancing. The challenge is all the greater, given that Covid rates are beginning to surge again in Europe