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The problem with the serial killer genre these days is that it takes real skill to do something really original. Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Charles Laughton, Jonathan Demme, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan all blazed the trail, with movies like 'Psycho,' 'Peeping Tom,' 'Night of the Hunter,' 'Silence of the Lambs,' 'Seven,' 'Zodiac' and 'Insomnia' pushing the boundaries of the genre. But as studios have started to concentrate on money spinning superhero movies, cute animated features and low ball comedies, the genre has started to migrate to TV with shows like Showtime's 'Dexter,' BBC's 'The Fall,' HBO's 'True Detective' and Netflix's 'Mindhunter'. Enter John Lee Hancock with 'The Little Things' - a film which Steven Spielberg was originally linked with as far back as 1993 and Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty and Danny de Vito also contemplated directing at various st

Fashion is ridiculous. Staging extravagant shows with stick thin models wearing designer clothes is nonsense - especially as most people will never get within a whiff of seeing those designs in real life, let alone wearing them. Created by a small cabal of designers for the obscenely wealthy, most of the designs have little relevance to the majority of people. And that is why Robert Altman got stuck into the industry in his savagely funny 1994 comedy 'Pret A Porter'. Ridley Scott isn't the first person that comes to mind when you think of a director making a movie about the fashion industry or the Gucci empire. However 'House of Gucci' is a pretty entertaining and flamboyant romp through the lives of the family who set up the company. Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, an attractive young woman who draws wolf whistles from the men employed in the truck company run by her father, Vincent Riotta's Fernando in Milan. Patrizia is an office manager in the family firm

There's an air of desperation about Halle Berry's directorial debut, the Mixed Martial Arts drama 'Bruised' - as if she is a movie star with something to prove. Like the character she plays, Berry has had better days and there was a time when she appeared at the peak of her powers. Early in her career, there was an eyecatching role alongside Warren Beatty in the political satire 'Bulworth' followed by an Oscar winning performance for the death row tale 'Monster's Ball'. She was also an 'X Men' star and played a major character in a Bond movie. But then her star waned after the disappointment of 'Catwoman' and ever since then, she has not commanded the high profile roles she once enjoyed. Berry's character in 'Bruised,' Jackie Justice is a former MMA champ from Newark whose best days seem to be behind her. Once a big deal in the sport, she famously lost face and the plot during her 11th bout, committing the sin of leaving t

For a debut feature film, the decision to adapt Nella Larsen's 1929 novel 'Passing' is an incredibly ambitious one by Rebecca Hall. The novel is not widely known to most cinemagoers and while it was well received initially when it was first published, it got very little traction outside of New York. Over the years, academics have hailed Larsen as a key figure in African American, feminist and modernist writing. However some have tended to view her debut novel 'Quicksand' as a more impressive work. Hall's movie of 'Passing' may finally bring Larsen's novel to wider attention. However it too is a venture that does not seem tailored for the mainstream. Shot in monochrome on a 4:3 aspect ratio for an extremely modest budget of $10 million without any major household names, it has taken the actor 10 years to bring her film addressing race to the big screen. But boy, has it been worth the wait. Tessa Thompson is Irene Redfield, a lighter skinned African Am

  You've got to hand it to Stephen Merchant. If you've got some pull in Hollywood, you may as well use it. And that's what Merchant has done with his six part comedy drama 'The Outlaws'. Otherwise, how would BBC1 ever hope to get Christopher Walken to take on a role in a primetime TV comedy drama set in Bristol? 'The Outlaws' is a BBC1 and Amazon Prime co-production which sees Merchant and Elgin James team up for a story about six offenders doing community service in red bibs with their supervisor. Merchant plays a lonely, bumbling solicitor, Greg who gets caught in his car with a prostitute after the breakdown of his marriage and who makes the situation worse by trying to escape and crashing into a police vehicle. Walken is a seventysomething ex con originally from the US who is released from prison for passing dodgy checks and is forced to live with his estranged daughter, Dolly Wells' Margaret and her two children, Guillermo Bedward's Tom and Isla