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  Of all the murders that have taken place in Ireland, few have puzzled and fascinated the Irish public as much as the killing of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in West Cork. A twice married French documentary filmmaker, she had fallen in love with the country in her teens while learning English. After scouting Connemara in Co Galway on the west coast for a holiday home, she found her dream place instead in the remote village of Schull in Co Cork in the south, with a view of Fastnet lighthouse. Schull is as isolated as you can get and she was a regular visitor to the farmhouse and a community whose many "blow ins" - a Cork phrase used to describe outsiders who settled in the village - included Colin Vearncombe, otherwise known as  the 1980s pop sensation Black. Wild and rugged, Schull has spectacular Atlantic coast views, particularly from Three Castle Head which earned its name because of its three towers dating back from the Norman era. Schull, however, would in December 1996 be

  Oh Liam. Liam, Liam, Liam - we need to talk. Over the years in films like 'Lamb,' 'The Mission,' 'Sweet As You Are,' 'Michael Collins,' 'Five Minutes of Heaven,' 'Ordinary Love' and, of course, 'Schindler's List,' you have proven what a good actor you are. So why do you persist in trying to be the Celtic Clint Eastwood? Your record as an action hero has been patchy at best. Is it not time that you go back to doing what you do best? Liam's latest action escapade is Jonathan Hensleigh's thriller 'The Ice Road' about truckers undertaking a perilous journey to rescue trapped Canadian miners. Streamed by Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK and Ireland, it is an unintentionally funny, chowder headed action movie with a terrible script penned by the director. Hensleigh's movie begins with miners working underground who hit a methane pocket, causing an explosion to rip through the mine and trap 26 of the

  When it comes to ageing action heroes, Charles Bronson, Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood blazed the trail. Action stars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan and Bruce Willis have also continued to thump baddies in their sixties and seventies. However in the last 13 years, Liam Neeson has become the go to ageing guy for dispatching evil doers on the big screen.  It is a market Neeson desperately needs to walk away from. But who would have wagered money on actor and comedian Bob Odenkirk stepping into those shoes? Yet here is the star of ' Breaking Bad ' and ' Better Call Saul ' punching, gouging, stabbing and shooting his way through Russian director Ilya Naishuller's 'Nobody'. And somehow, against all odds, it works. Odenkirk plays Hutch Mansell, an ordinary man living a humdrum suburban life. He gets up, often forgets to put the bins out on a Tuesday, exercises, makes breakfast for his family, goes to work, guzzles coffee, comes home

After 15 months of living in lockdown or semi-lockdown, what we need right now is a TV movie about lockdown - right? With theatres shut and TV and film production radically changed because of Covid, actors, writers and directors have tried to make sense of the past year and a half of learning to cope with the pandemic. Michael Sheen and David Tennant were among the first out of the traps last June with the  first series of their Zoom based sitcom 'Staged'  on BBC1. Earlier this year on the big screen (but really the small screen because of the shutting of cinemas), Doug Liman directed Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Steven Knight scripted, comedy movie 'Lockdown' about a couple stuck together at home just as they were planning to separate. Now in June 2021, we have Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy in 'Together,' a BBC TV movie about a couple stuck together in a house during lockdown.   just as they were planning to separate. Written by Dennis Kelly and d

The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan famously said t he tragedy of Srebrenica would "forever haunt the history of the United Nations.” Eight thousand Muslim men and boys were massacred in 1995 by General Ratko Mladic's Serbian forces in one of the most shocking acts of genocide of the post Second World War era. 25,000-30,000 other people were also displaced despite initially being under the protection of United Nations forces. Judge Fouad Road would later observe at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague that "a truly terrible massacre of the Muslim population appears to have taken place. "Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of mem buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson. "These are truly scenes from Hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Zbanic recr