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  A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE During the Cold War there was no shortage of movies and TV dramas dealing with the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. From Stanley Kramer's ' On the Beach ' in 1959 with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardiner and Fred Astaire to Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller ' Fail Safe ' with Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Dan O'Herlihy to Nicholas Meyer's 1983 miniseries ' The Day After ' with Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenburg, filmmakers and screenwriters explored the horror of nuclear warfare from the perspective of military personnel or ordinary citizens. ' Threads ' in 1984 with Reece Dinsdale and Karen Meagher on BBC2 was a particularly graphic and sobering account of how a regional English city like Sheffield would fare. Others took a slightly different approach, with the director Stanley Kubrick deploying satire in 1964 to still drive home the horror in ' Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Lov...

  TASK Four years after giving us the superb ' Mare of Easttown ,' screenwriter Brad Inglesby has delivered another HBO miniseries with fully fleshed out characters struggling to do the right thing. Set once again in Pennsylvania, 'Task' features Mark Ruffalo as a former Catholic priest turned FBI agent who is recalled to field duty after spending his time at recruitment fairs in colleges. Tom Brandis, however, is nursing his own demons. He's a widower with a drink problem who is estranged from his adopted son, Andrew Russell's Ethan who is serving time in jail as he waits to be tried for murder. In spite of his messy family life, Tom is asked by his no nonsense FBI boss, Martha Plimpton's Kathleen McGinty to head up a hunt for a missing young boy, Ben Doherty's Sam who has disappeared after his drug dealing parents are gunned down in a stash house. The shooting, however, has been a botched robbery, with Tom Pelphrey's garbage collector Robbie Prende...

  THE LOST BUS Few filmmakers today are better at taking audiences into the eye of the storm than Paul Greengrass. Whether it's the terror that unfolded on  the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday , in the  skies of the United States on 9/11  or on the seas  at the hands of Somali pirates  or if it's simply  the thrill of the hunt  in the  Bourne spy movies , Greengrass is probably the best at conjuring up authentic, high octane action sequences. So it's with some glee that audiences will no doubt view his new collaboration with Matthew McConaghey and America Ferrera in a movie about the 2018 Camp Fire that raged through Butte County in northern California - one of the deadliest wildfires in the history of the state. 'The Lost Bus' is an account of how, against all the odds, bus driver Kevin McKay ferried 22 elementary schoolchildren and their teacher through some of the worst wildfires California had ever seen. Working from a screenplay by Gre...

LEONARD AND HUNGRY PAUL After all the bombast and the clatter of ' House of Guinness ,' it's time for something much more muted. 'Leonard and Hungry Paul' is an understated BBC and RTE co-production that's definitely not about alpha males. Adapted from the  well received 2019 novel  by Irish civil servant Ronan Hession, it's a story of two nerdy adult friends who are anything but champions of the universe and are content to fulfil a daily ritual of playing boardgames since childhood. Alex Lawther's softly spoken Leonard is a ghost writer of children's encyclopaedias for Paul Reid's insufferable Mark Baxter who takes all the credit for his work. Within minutes of the show Leonard, who has a close bond with his mum, has his world turned upside down when she unexpectedly dies. Luckily, he has Laurie Kynaston's even quirkier Hungry Paul and his family to lean on as he comes to terms with his loss. He also falls deeply in love with a bubbly new wo...

  HOUSE OF GUINNESS Guinness drinkers know there's a certajn art to pouring a perfect pint whether it is in a pub or straight from a can. Tilt the glass at the right angle and you get a pint that not only tastes good but looks good. Like a correctly poured pint, Netflix's new period drama 'House of Guinness' definitely looks the part. But as stout drinkers will tell you, there are stouts that may look the part but they certainly do not meet the taste test. 'House of Guinness' is an eight part drama from the fevered mind of ' Peaky Blinders ' creator Steven Knight. And certainly, it's the most 'Peaky Blinders' a TV show could be without actually being 'Peaky Blinders'. Full of industrial grime, family scheming, swaggering males, comely maidens, wiser older ladies, savage acts of violence and brash rock music, like 'Peaky Blinders' it takes great liberties with history. The show begins with the passing of the Dublin brewing magn...

  I SWEAR If there is one person who has done more than anyone to raise the profile of Tourette's Syndrome, it is Scotsman John Davidson. Aged 16, he came to national attention in the UK when the BBC aired a documentary about him and his condition. ' John's Not Mad ' became an instant TV classic in 1989, showing the teenager's struggle with a condition that caused him to uncontrollably swear obscenities, shout inappropriate remarks about those around him, twitch and make involuntary moments. Unintentionally funny, some people treated the film under the BBC's 'QED' strand like it was a cult comedy classic. But the reality for John Davidson and other Tourette's sufferers was it was far from funny - hugely impacting on their lives, with a lot of people thinking they were being deliberately offensive or were insane and the condition making it really difficult for them to progress through the education system, find work and romance. Two subsequent documen...

  If you were to ask people to name a Diane Keaton role, two probably come to mind. The first would undoubtedly be the eponymous character in Woody Allen's romcom 'Annie Hall' - a role that won her a Best Actress Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. The second would be Kay, Michael Corleone's WASP wife who becomes increasingly repulsed by his ruthlessness in Francis Coppola's 'The Godfather' trilogy. There were many other acclaimed dramatic roles in movies like Warren Beatty's 'Reds,' Alan Parker's 'Shoot The Moon' and Jerry Zaks' 'Marvin's Room'. But she also enjoyed huge success in comedies over her career like Charles Shyer's 'Baby Boom,' his 'The Father of the Bride' movies, Hugh Wilson's 'First Wives Club' and Nancy Meyers' 'Something's Gotta Give' and her collaborations with Allen on seven other feature length movies. The predominant image of Keaton, though, is as the...