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   BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER  When you think of movies about gambling, you tend to think of films like ' The Sting ,' ' The Cooler ,' ' Rounders ' or ' Casino '. With the exception of ' Croupier ,' a lot of these tend to be set in cities like New York or Las Vegas. Now ' All Quiet On The Western Front ' and ' Conclave ' director Edward Berger has given the genre a distinctive Asian flavour. The glitzy Chinese region of Macau is the setting for the German director's darkly comic psychological thriller 'Ballad of A Small Player' -  an adaptation of English author Lawrence Osbourne's 2014 novel . Starring Colin Farrell, the Dubliner plays an Irish conman posing as an Anglo Irish Lord living the high life in luxury hotels and casinos. While his real name is Brendan Reilly, he adopts the persona of a washed up peer called Lord Doyle who is on an epic losing streak in Macau's casinos. Reilly is up to his eyeballs in d...

  THE CHORAL There's something wonderful about sitting down to watch another Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner collaboration. Over the years, they have worked together on six productions of Bennett's plays, adapting three of them for the big screen - ' The Madness of King George ,' ' The History Boys ' and ' The Lady In The Van '. So it's good to see them bringing an original story to the screen, with the World War One era tale 'The Choral'. Set in the small Yorkshire town of Ramsden, the film follows the struggles of a local choral society struggling to find tenors because most of their young men have volunteered to fight in the war. The mainstays of the choral society are Alun Armstrong's undertaker Mr Trickett, Mark Addy's photographer Mr Fyton, Ron Cook's local vicar and Roger Allam's local mill owner and alderman Bernard Duxbury. Not long into the film, the four man committee are sent into a flap when their choirmaster als...

TRESPASSES Adaptations of popular novels for the big or small screen are tricky. Readers build a certain picture of the story in their minds and there's a real risk your interpretation can alienate them. But it certainly helps to have the original author involved in the production. Channel 4  would seem to have an advantage, therefore, for its Northern Ireland Troubles drama 'Trespasses' whose author  Louise Kennedy  is onboard as an executive producer. Adapted for the screen by  Ailbhe Keogan , the four part miniseries tells the story of a doomed love affair between a Catholic primary schoolteacher and an unconventional Protestant lawyer in early 1970s Belfast. Lola Petticrew 's Cushla lives with her alcoholic mum,  Gillian Anderson 's Gina Lavery while the city wriggles under the grip of a bitter sectarian conflict that is fuelled by political instability. The  IRA, INLA, UDA and UVF  are engaged in a war that also involves the British Army and the...

FRANKENSTEIN As of October 2025, there had been 423 movies featuring some version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 204 short films, 78 TV series and 287 episodes of TV shows also featured the creature and it's easy to understand why. Mary Shelley's tale is an Icarus story. It's about man striving to be God, flying too close to the sun and then crashing. It's about a surgeon creating life and the consequences of what happens when he rejects his creation. It's a cautionary tale too about scientific ambition giving way to disappointment and regret long before we had the real life example of ' Oppenheimer '. The first movie of Shelley's story was  J Searle Dawley's 1910 silent film  with Augustus Phillips and Charles Ogle. James Whale's  1931 Universal Pictures adaptation with Boris Karloff  as The Creature was arguably the most influential, conjuring up the image of a square headed creature that would dominate screen depictions and Halloween cost...

  SPRINGSTEEN - DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Rock biopics should be a guaranteed hit if they're any way half decent - bringing ready made audiences into cinemas. However they can also be formulaic and can look like obvious awards grabs by actors desperate to impress audiences with their impersonation of famous faces. Scott Cooper's 'Springsteen - Deliver Me From Nowhere' stands out, though, from the pack with its focus on the influences that shaped Bruce Springsteen's most daring album 'Nebraska' and also because of its honest depiction of the star's mental health. Jeremy Allen White plays the New Jersey rock icon - an interesting piece of casting because he looks nothing like Bruce. However you quickly forget that as the star of ' The Bear ' captures his distinctive gait, his rasping voice, his unique stance at a microphone, his onstage energy and even the way he tightens his jaw as he belts out songs. Unlike Timothee Chalamet's recent foray into...

   SLOW HORSES, S5 If you were to ask people to name an Apple TV show, the chances are that those who know the streaming service's output would probably say ' Ted Lasso ' or ' Slow Horses '. Outside of  the football sitcom , the  London spy series  is the other jewel in Apple TV's crown - having mopped up BAFTA, Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nominations since first landing on our screens on April Fool's Day, 2022. Critics adore the espionage series which has built up a cult following around the world with its cynical humour and rebellious spirit. In a big investment in English screenwriter  Will Smith's adaptation of Mick Herron's spy novels , the producers have for some years shot its series back to back. This ensures that as soon as one series airs, the next is already in the can and fans don't have to wait more than a year for the next instalment. 2025's story begins in typical 'Slow Horses' fashion with a big action set piece. I...

SLOW HORSES, S4 After three adventures where they have bested agents  inside and outside British intelligence , the team from Slough House face their biggest challenge yet in Series Four. 'Slow Horses' begins its fourth series in typically shocking fashion, with an explosion ripping through London as a suicide bomber drives into the Westacres Shopping Mall. The man responsible is Zachary Hart's Robert Winters, with a pre-recorded video published of him admitting the attack. As armed police break into his flat to find forensic evidence linking him to the bombing, a booby trap device lies in wait and detonates, killing three officers. With a new out of his depth boss at the head of MI5, James Callis' Claude Whelan, his deputy Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner feels the heat about why the intelligence services were caught off guard. Meanwhile Jack Lowden's Slough House operative River Cartwright confides in Rosalind Eleazar's colleague Louisa Guy that he ...

SLOW HORSES, S3 We know the drill by now. Each season of 'Slow Horses' begins with a big, pulsating set piece. But this time around it's not occurring in Blighty but in Istanbul where Sope Dirisu's head of security at the UK Embassy Sean Donovan is spying on Katherine Waterston's MI5 agent Alison Dunn. She is suspected of trying to leak information that could be highly damaging to British intelligence. The only problem is Sean and Alison are also lovers and when she discovers he is spying on her a cat and mouse game around Istanbul ensues as he tries to intercept a stolen document she is going to pass on to a mystery man. Losing him during the chase at dusk, Sean eventually catches up with where she is at an empty football stadium, only to discover Alison has been thrown off the building. A year later, Sean resurfaces in London at an AA meeting that Saskia Reeves' Slough House office administrator Catherine Standish attends regularly. Posing as an alcoholic name...

SLOW HORSES, S2 Having avoided shouldering the blame for a false flag operation that went badly wrong in the show's inaugural season, Apple TV's 'Slow Horses' are back for more adventures. However this time it isn't the far right the gang of MI5 screw ups in Slough House have to worry about. Season Two finds Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb and his gang of MI5 rejects encountering dodgy Russians after the suspicious death of a former disgraced comrade, Phil Davis' Richard Bough. The victim dies while following a man who is acting suspiciously outside his shop. In fact, the incident is of sufficient concern to Lamb that he combs video footage of Bough's last movements and even searches the bus he made his final journey in. There Lamb finds Bough's mobile with a message 'Cicada' on it, prompting him to get Jack Lowden's River Cartwright and the rest of the team to dig deeper. Independent of Lamb's operation, two of the team Dustin Demri-Burns...

SLOW HORSES, S1 If you were a BBC, ITV or Channel 4 drama commissioner, you're probably cursing your luck. Long before Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ came on the scene, you would had the pick of the crop when commissioning television scripts. Great writers like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, Jimmy McGovern, Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and Alan Plater all made their name on terrestrial television and delivered stunning work. Huge audiences tuned in for adaptations of Robert Graves' 'I Claudius,' Anthony Trollope's 'The Barchester Chronicles' or John Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. However the shift in the British television landscape brought about by streaming has changed all that. Nowhere is that better illustrated than with a show like 'Slow Horses' winding up on Apple TV+. An adaptation of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' novels, Will Smith's spy series has all the ha...