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Neville Chamberlain will always be remembered as the British Prime Minister who was duped into appeasing Hitler before the Nazis invaded much of Europe. Images of Chamberlain prematurely declaring "peace in our time" after talks in Munich that allowed the Nazis to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia continue to haunt his legacy. By way of contrast, his successor Winston Churchill is the yardstick by which all British Prime Ministers are judged at a time of crisis. Churchill is seen as the pugnacious, wily Englishman who defiantly resisted a Nazi invasion and played a key part in the eventual defeat of Hitler. Robert Harris' 2017 novel 'Munich' sought to rehabilitate Chamberlain's image and now it has been turned into a gripping Netflix political thriller by German director Christian Schwochow. Adapting Harris' novel for the big and small screen, Ben Power begins his tale in Oxford where Jannis Niewhonner's Paul Von Hartmann, Liv Lisa Fries' L...

'Belfast, how I know you so well. You're like Heaven. You're like Hell ' During the tail end of Northern Ireland's Troubles those three lines in the song  'Belfast'  by the band Energy Orchard seemed to best sum up the ambivalence of many people in the city towards their hometown. To live in Belfast during the Troubles was a schizophrenic experience. On the one hand, there was a wonderfully earthy sense of humour in the city, a deep love for sport and the arts, a warmth towards visitors even though they were rare and a deep sense of community. On the other, there was fear - fear that violence could erupt at any minute, fear and bitterness about the loss of life and a deep, deep unease about the sectarian division fostered at an early age. Twenty eight years on from the IRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires, Belfast still bears the scars of a 25 year conflict. That may sound like a cliché but it's not. It's a fact. Heavily fortified peace walls sti...

It's a measure of how far RTE drama has come that within weeks of being broadcast in Ireland, the thriller 'Hidden Assets' was snapped up by BBC4. A co-production with Screen Ireland, Screen Flanders and AMC's Acorn TV, its Irish and Belgian settings and its mix of English and Flemish speaking characters no doubt appealed to BBC4's programmers who have always had a penchant for European police thrillers. The central dynamic of a female Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) investigator from Ireland and a streetwise Belgian cop evokes memories of 'The Bridge '. However that formula is also fused with the forensic combing of financial accounts and the interrogative style of BBC1's corruption drama ' Line of Duty '. 'Hidden Assets,' it has to be said, doesn't come up to the standard of either of those shows. Nevertheless, it is a pretty decent stab at it. Angeline Ball plays Criminal Assets Bureau investigator Emer Berry who at the start of write...

  There's a moment early on in Howard Franklin's underappreciated 1990 crime comedy  'Quick Change,'  where Bill Murray's character Grimm walks into a bank dressed as a clown. Walking up to a security man, he reveals what appears to be dynamite strapped to him. "What kind of a clown are you?," the guard asks. "The crying on the inside kind, I guess," Grimm drolly replies. In all three series of  'After Life,'  the crying of Ricky Gervais has been very much on the outside. A drama masquerading as a sitcom, the English comedian and actor's show has revelled in the tears of its clown. There's no doubt the show has built a loyal fanbase among some people on Netflix. Its focus on the grief of a man who has lost his wife to cancer has struck a chord with those who have gone through similar pain. 'After Life,'  however, is a hard watch. It indulges some of the worst aspects of Gervais' comic persona. There's a cruel strea...