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  KING AND CONQUEROR Mention 1066 in Britain and people think of the Battle of Hastings, the Bayeux Tapestry and King Harold getting an arrow through the eye. But now BBC1 and CBS have attempted to flesh out the story in a muddy, bloody eight part miniseries. 'King and Conqueror' by Michael Robert Johnson boasts a 'Game of Thrones' star and one of Britain's most prolific screen actors. Denmark's Nikolaj William Coster-Waldau is best known for playing the thoroughly bad egg, Jaime Lannister in the HBO swords and armour epic. Meanwhile James Norton has made a name for himself playing a broad range of roles from a twisted thug in 'Happy Valley' to the soldier Andrei Bolonsky in 'War and Peace,' a Russian Mobster's son in 'McMafia' to a terminally ill working class Belfast dad in 'Nothing Special'. Both men are accomplished actors who you would imagine would enjoy sinking their teeth into a historical epic with swords, shields and...

  CHRISTY While Britain has a long, proud history of kitchen sink cinema, its neighbour across the Irish Sea has been developing its own realist voice too. From Cathal Black to Lenny Abrahamson, Aisling Walsh to Darren Thornton, Gerard Barrett to Frank Berry, Irish filmmakers have not been afraid to bring the reality of people's lives to the big screen. Now we can add Brendan Canty to the list. Previously known for directing the video for  Hozier's monster hit 'Take Me To Church, ' Canty's debut movie 'Christy' has been wowing festival audiences and film critics across Europe. In February, the film  picked up the Generation 14+ Grand Prix award at the Berlin Film Festival . Five months later, it walked away with the  Best Irish Film prize at the Galway Film Fleadh . Set in Cork, 'Christy' stars Danny Power, who some audiences may know as Conor's nemesis from  the Cork based BBC and RTE sitcom 'The Young Offenders' . At the start of Canty...

  Steven Soderbergh was 12 when he knew he wanted to be a director. His filmmaking epiphany occurred in a cinema in St Petersburg, Florida in the summer of 1975. The movie showing that night was 'Jaws'. Soderbergh explained to National Public Radio in the US 38 years later: "I had always seen a lot of films because my father loved movies, but in that two hours and four  minutes, they went from something that I used to view as entertainment and became something else. "And I had two questions when I came out of that theatre. One is, what does directed by mean, exactly? And who is Steven Spielberg? "And luckily, there was a book that had been published around the time the movie came out called 'The Jaws Log', which was written by Carl Gottlieb, one of the co-screenwriters, and it turned out to be one of the best making-of books that anybody has ever produced and I bought a copy of that and read it over and over again and highlighted any mention of Steven Spi...

  THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB There's always a certain theatricality to movies or TV shows about sleuths. Whether it's the adventures of  Hercule Poirot  or  Jessica Fletcher ,  Benoit Blanc  or  Charlie Cale , audiences often have to wade through well known actors delivering very wordy scripts as their characters fall under suspicion for a dastardly crime. As many shows and films have discovered, there's a huge risk in these talkfests of the cast overacting and the direction becoming bland and stale. Netflix's 'The Thursday Murder Club' takes this challenge on, having built up quite an audiencewith a successful series of books. Set in a retirement home where four amateur sleuths meet up and solve crimes while also indulging other interests like baking, knitting and yoga, British TV presenter Richard Osman's series has spawned five books and had huge commercial and critical success. The books have topped best seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, wi...

  HOSTAGE Channel 5 must be ripping. Usually the UK's fifth terrestrial channel corners the market in ropey thrillers. Yet here's a UK political drama on Netflix that churns out frankly unbelievable plotlines and dreadful dialogue. Written and created by Matt Charman - an Oscar nominated screenwriter no less for his work on Steven Spielberg's ' Bridge of Spies ' - 'Hostage' casts Suranne Jones as a Labour-ish British Prime Minister and Julie Delpy as a conservative French President. Jones' Oldham MP who has risen to the top job, Abigail Dalton is losing her way in the polls, thanks to tight budgets, a National Health Service drugs crisis and problems with immigration. Meeting Delpy's President Vivienne Toussaint, who is preparing to seek re-election, it doesn't help that Abigail was caught off mic calling the French leader a handmaiden to the far right. At a summit in Downing Street, they attempt to patch things up with a deal on immigration and ...

MOVIEDROME: WELCOME TO THE CULT "Television - the drug of the nation - breeding ignorance and feeding radiation." So claimed Michael Franti's hip hop musical ensemble The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy in 1992. That was then, what about now? With the advent of You Tube and streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu/Disney+, you suspect that view is even more keenly felt by Franti. Not all TV is mind numbing and even then, there were shows that thumbed their nose at the dumbing down of the medium. Take BBC2's cult movie show 'Moviedrome' for example - a programme that did much to introduce British audiences to quirky cinema and celebrated unusual films and all their imperfections. Fronted initially by the Liverpudlian indie filmmaker Alex Cox and then the Belfast born documentary filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins, it introduced audiences of all ages to forgotten sci-fi and horror movies, spaghetti Westerns, classic film noir, quirky European tales...