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  THE BOMBING OF PAN AM 123 There's always a danger when two films or dramas dealing with the same historical event are released that the one that comes out second fails to excite audiences.. Inevitably viewers who have seen the first version will measure the latter against it. And if the earlier version is regarded as having done a really good job, the subsequent production is left fighting an uphill battle to convince audiences it is worth investing their time. Earlier this year, Sky Atlantic gave us the first of two TV dramas this year about the December 1988 bomb attack on Pan Am 123 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie that killed 270 people. Otto Bathurst, Jim Loach and David Harrower's ' Lockerbie: The Search for Truth ' focused on victims campaigner Dr Jim Swire's quest to find out who was responsible for the attack and his gradual belief that the only man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent. Jonathan Lee, Adam Morane-Griffiths and...

   BIG MAN Leave aside  the online storm over Stormzy's wig . 'Big Man' is the first film to be made by the rapper's Merky Films production company. A 20 minute short directed by Aneil Karia, the Croydon rap star not only funds the film but stars in it. This isn't Stormzy's first foray into acting, though, having previously appeared as himself in Michaela Coel's Channel 4 sitcom ' Chewing Gum ' and the BBC TV drama ' Noughts and Crosses '. Shot entirely on an iPhone, Karia's film casts Stormzy as an ex-rapper Tenzman who is trying to get two supersized fridges installed in his home. Disgusted when the delivery men suggest demolishing part of his kitchen wall, he instead turns to two local kids, Klevis Brahja's Klevis and Jaydon Eastman's Tyrell for help - haggling a price for them coming into his home and helping him shift the fridges. Naturally the boys ignore Tenzman's warnings about not touching anything in his house. When ...

   28 YEARS LATER There are great movie directors and then the others. Some are jobbing hacks who thrash out any old film to placate audiences and the studios. Those filmmakers enjoy long careers as long as their movies keep making money. Other directors have a film or two at the start of their careers that shine but they subsequently struggle to reach the same heights. Many fade into obscurity because they can't score another critical or commercial hit. Great filmmakers, however, hit the heights with impressive regularity, building up a body of work that may not be consistently good but still fascinates. Every time they get behind the camera, they seem to go for broke and even when their work is flawed, you can still see theitr flair for visual storytelling. Danny Boyle is  that sort of director. Movies like ' Shallow Grave ' and undoubtedly his best film ' Trainspotting ' made his name early in his career, giving him an immediate reputation as the most innovative ...

   THE GOLD, S2 Series Two of Neil Forsyth's 'The Gold' isn't really about gold. As Jessie J would say, it's " all about the money ." Picking up  from Series One, which aired in 2003 , Hugh Bonneville's Metropolitan Police DCS Philip Boyce and his team remain determined to jail the criminals behind the 1983 Brink's Mat Robbery in Heathrow - well some of them, if not all of them. However they also want to make them pay - financially. Hitting their pockets, though, won't be easy. Tom Cullen's silver tongued, former gold dealer John Palmer is living a life of luxury, having dodged conviction in the Old Bailey for his role in recycling the gold. Now based in Tenerife, he is making a fortune duping British holidaymakers into purchasing timeshares. Meanwhile Sam Spruell's East End gangster Charlie Miller has recovered some of his share of the Brinks Mat bullion from a Cornish tin mine and sets about trying to launder the proceeds. Engaging Jo...

  THE LAST OF US, S2 It's hard to review Season Two of 'The Last of Us' without giving away plot spoilers. So if you don't want to know major plot twists from Season Two of the hit HBO show, then maybe you should wait until you have watched the entire season before reading this. (SPOILERS APLENTY!!) Season Two finds Pedro Pascal's Joel and Bella Ramsay's Ellie back in Jackson, Wyoming five years after the bloody conclusion of  Series One  which saw him slaughter Fireflies in Salt Lake City who were going to sacrifice her to create an antidote to the fungus that turns people bitten by zombies into them. Fleeing Salt Lake City, Joel lied to Ellie that there were other immune people in the medical facility when it was attacked but they were unable to find a cure. Now back living in the fortified community in Jackson with Joel's brother, Gabriel Luna's Tommy, Joel and Ellie's surrogate father-daughter relationship has gone off the rails as she pals about...

CAL Sometimes, it's fun to revisit an old film from your youth. In this case, it's Pat O'Connor's sobering Northern Ireland romance 'Cal' which has been restored 41 years after it was released when the Troubles were still raging. Starring John Lynch and Helen Mirren and adapted by the author Bernard MacLaverty from his own novel, it has been restored and re-released in the UK and Ireland, thanks to Film Hub NI - a community cinema organisation. Believing it to be a significant milestone in the development of Northern Irish cinema, Film Hub NI's revival reveals it to be a surprisingly effective movie which is not without its flaws. Lynch plays Cal McCluskey, the son of Donal McCann's abattoir worker Seamie in a rural Mid Ulster town. Cal is involved in the IRA, driving Stevan Rimkus' Crilly to a local farmhouse where his colleague  murders an off-duty Royal Ulster Constabulary officer and wounds the victim's elderly father. A year later, Cal comes...

   HACKS, S4 If you're an avid reader of this blog (and there are a few of you), you'll know I have  been shouting for some time about the show 'Hacks' . A HBO comedy drama about the ups and downs of a relationship between an ageing,  hard as nails Las Vegas comedian and her smart, bisexual twentysomething writer, it initially  had a low key release in the United Kingdom and Ireland , with the first two seasons slipping quietly onto Amazon Prime. With Jean Smart starring as the comedian Deborah Vance and Hannah Einbinder as her disaster prone writer Ava Daniels, the show has increasingly attracted word of mouth on this side of the Atlantic as it has hoovered up Emmy, Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe awards.  After a long wait,  the third season of the show  finally found its way onto another UK and Irish streaming platform, NowTV and Sky Glass earlier this year as well as on the Sky Max channel in the UK and TG4 in Ireland. Those who watc...

NONNAS They tend not to release films like 'Nonnas' in cinemas anymore. In the 1990s and early 2000s you still used to get plenty of light comedy dramas that fared decently at the box office. These days, though, if they do hit the big screen, they end up in arthouse cinemas or wind up on streaming services. And that is the fate of Stephen Chbosky's 'Nonnas' - a tale inspired by a real Italian restaurant in Staten Island that was acquired for $20 million on Netflix. Vince Vaughn plays Joe Scarvella, a Brooklynite who is mourning the death of his mama who along with his grandmother or nonna imbued him with a love of homely Italian cooking when he was a kid in the 1960s. Now a bus company mechanic, Joe is obsessed with trying to recreate her gravy and cooking her recipes at home. As he comes to terms with his loss, he's taken aside by his best friend, Joe Manganiello's Bruno and his wife, Drea De Matteo's Stella who are concerned about how he'll manage ...

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING There's an episode of 'The IT Crowd' where Chris O'Dowd's Roy and Richard Ayoade's Moss go to the theatre with their boss Katherine Parkinson's Jen when she is meant to be on a date. The very camp musical they go to is terrible. However Moss is so impressed, he declares at the interval that the show is "insanely brilliant!" Watching 'Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning,' the last instalment of Tom Cruise's blockbuster espionage franchise, I felt like Moss. The plot is preposterous. The pacing in the first hour is leaden. The dialogue is, at times, ear scraping. And yet,.. I found myself grinning throughout and relishing every frame. The eighth and supposedly last instalment of a franchise that began with Brian de Palma's first 'Mission Impossible' film in 1996, the movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie knows exactly what its audience wants. The fanbase expects big, death defy...

  BONO: STORIES OF SURRENDER There's been a bit of a trend of late of rock n'roll elder statesmen taking to the theatre to reflect on their lives. In recent years, we have seen  Bruce Springsteen on Broadway  and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne following suit with his show ' American Utopia '. Having recently published a memoir and an album of stripped back, re-recorded U2 tracks, it was inevitable that the band's frontman Bono has been drawn into performing a show about his life. Never one to shy away from narrating his own life, 2023 saw the Dubliner taking to the stages of the Beacon Theater in New York, the London Palladium and The Olympia Theatre in his hometown to perform 'Stories of Surrender' while he promoted his autobiography of the same name. Now two years later, Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik brings the show to our screens in glorious black and white - courtesy of Apple TV+. But is his collaboration with Bono  worthy of the seven minute s...