Recensioni di Lejink

It wasn't surprising to read that Douglas Sirk was offered first dibs on this epic weepie. The master melodramatist, however, decided not to come out of retirement for the assignment, but I have to say that David Lowell Rich makes for an able substitute, seamlessly fitting in with many of the other components of Sirk's great run of features from the late 50's, including Ross Hunter as producer, Lana Turner as the star and especially Russell Metty as principal cameraman.

Turner once again suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as Holly Anderson, the loving wife of the coming man, John Forsythe's wealthy American diplomat Clayton Sr. She dotes on their baby son Clayton Jr, but when Sr's aspiring career requires him to spend more time away from home in Washington, she recklessly falls in with Ricardo Montalban's smooth playboy, Phil Benton much to the annoyance of hubby's possessive sister Estelle, played by Constance Bennett.

When Eddie comes on too strong however at his place, it ends tragically for him, giving Estelle the chance she's been waiting for to effectively cancel Holly, faking her death and exiling her abroad to Denmark without a by-your-leave. There, she's romanced by a handsome middle-aged pianist but her burden of guilt won't allow her to accept his advances. From there, it really is downhill all the way until she hits rock bottom when she encounters Burgess Meredith's sleazy blackmailer who discovers her true identity and seeks to profit from it. Suffice it to say, the ballloon really goes up from there, culminating in a lengthy courtroom sequence where events come full circle for this unhappy woman.

This soap opera drama comes with more suds than Persil and it's up to the viewer to decide how much of a lather they can take. Me, I love a good soak in a bath of hot bubbles and so just let myself lie back and enjoy every ludicrous, high-pitched moment of it.

Metty's camera-work is sumptuous throughout, Lowell Rich shows himself to be an apt pupil of Sirk and the acting throughout by all the principals is commendably arrow-straight, particularly Turner as the tortured heroine, the only exception being Meredith, who appears to be miscast as the baddie.

Changing tastes dictated the critical and box office failure of the film on first release but if you planted this slap bang in the middle of Sirk's glorious run which began ten years earlier, I don't think you could spot the join, which is high praise indeed.

This provocative, far-reaching four-part Channel 4 drama focuses on an illicit love-affair between a young female primary school teacher Cushla and an older Protestant human rights solicitor, Michael Agnew, who has chosen to represent three IRA members who claim police brutality against them. They meet in a popular Belfast bar owned and managed by Cushla's brother where Michael is counted as one of the locals, although it's also frequented by off-duty soldiers from the occupying/peacekeeping British Army, depending on your political point of view.

Although she has another fellow-teacher, the on-the-surface bland and unexciting Gerry, pursuing her, she's soon headlong into an intensely passionate and physical affair with Michael, even as she knows he's married with a son. They're soon making trysts in his city centre love-nest, but the deeper the affair goes, the more strain their burgeoning relationship will come under.

Cushla has other worries too. Her recently widowed mother has hit the bottle hard and is becoming increasingly difficult to live with while the sympathy she shows to the family of one of her young pupils, the offspring of a mixed-religion couple, also brings her trouble.

It all comes to a head with the shocking climax to episode three, leaving Cushla to pick up the pieces and try to deal with the aftermath of her affair. Personally, I found the fourth and final episode to be somewhat anti-climactic in terms of tying up the loose ends, while the tag-on sugar-coated epilogue likewise also seemed unnecessary.

The evocation of mid-70's Northern Ireland was certainly captured in terms of the fashions, cars and domestic and public house interiors, although the choices of background and incidental music had me reaching for the mute button. The bitterness between the two sides of the religious divide and especially those caught in the middle by entering into mixed religion relationships was well brought out. Lola Petticrew as Cushla came over well as the unwitting party caught literally in the cross-hairs of sectarian hatred, Tom Cullen was good too as the handsome charming adulterer, but the real eye-opening performance was by Gi(llia)n Anderson as Cushla's "Gin, gin, everywhere" waste-of-space mother.

For the most part then, this was a gritty and believable series, all the more so as I grew up in Glasgow at around this time. Although I was aware of religious prejudice around me, I couldn't begin to comprehend living with its ugly, tribal manifestation as represented here just across the Irish Sea at the very same time.

Taking in themes of race relations, parenthood, domestic abuse and piling them onto the events of November 22nd 1963, the date of the Kennedy assassination, for me, in the end overloaded this movie, no matter its various good intentions.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Lurene, on the face of it, a typical Southern housewife living in Dallas. We learn that she recently miscarried her first baby and now just seems to tolerate more than love her boorish husband played by Brian Kerwin. Besotted with Jackie Kennedy, she's determined to see the First Lady in person, but instead will find herself drawn into the plight of a black man, Denis Haysbert's Paul Cator, on the run after abducting his very cowed five year old daughter Jonell, from a children's home. Together the three of them endure a long dark night of the soul with the police in hot pursuit and will rub up against different racial attitudes, all to the backdrop of the events in Washington as Mrs Kennedy has to grieve for her slain husband under the full glare of the media.

The film attempts to juxtapose the true black experience in the American South to today's rosy perception that Kennedy was the black man's friend who made a positive difference to their daily lives. But as one rather clunky, predictable event succeeds another, especially when Lurene and Paul are flung together one night in a barn, for me, the film's narrative credibility was broken.

Sporting a platinum blonde wave which makes her the spit of Marilyn Monroe, Pfeiffer puts over a convincing accent and comes across well as the ditzy but determined and well-meaning Lurene. Naysbert does his best playing the stereotypically noble, strong but silent handsome black man, first personified in movies by the likes of Sidney Poitier back in the day. A word of praise though for the young child actress playing his daughter.

This road movie with a social conscience clearly meant well and certainly captured the era but ultimately failed to take me with it along the way.

This early Hitchcock feature and his first talkie, "Blackmail", shows him really beginning to flex his directorial muscles. So we get a young, blonde female damsel in distress, a murder and manhunt for the killer but more than that, we get ample examples of the future Master of Suspense's burgeoning imaginative flair behind the camera.

Anny Ondra's Alice is at the centre of the action, a wilful young woman who after having a tiff in a tearoom with her police officer boyfriend Frank, lets herself be picked up by a young piano-playing artist she barely knows. He talks her into going back to his studio where he soon tries to rape her, only for her to reach out as a last resort for a sharp object, in a manner similar to Grace Kelly 25 years later in "Dial M for Murder", stabbing her assailant to death in what's clearly an act of self-defence.

But she panics and flees the scene, leaving behind incriminating evidence which leads a creepy neighbour to try to blackmail her and her boyfriend, who in one of those coincidences that only happens in the movies, is in on her secret too and is assigned to the murder investigation.

The most famous scene is the brilliant isolation of the word "knife" in the inane conversation of her murder-fixated neighbour, but also of note are the transformation in Alice's fevered imagination of a neon street-sign of champagne bottles into a plunging dagger and an exciting chase through the British Museum. There's even a shot looking down a staircase which of course Hitchcock would elaborate on much later in his career.

Yes, elsewhere, there are more than their fair share of static shots and lots of eye-acting so much so that at one point you can almost hear the murder victim being cued up before he twice walks to the camera, but making allowances for a young director still coming to terms with his craft, it's still a remarkably assured production.

Miss Ondra is delightful as the put-upon heroine and is miles above the level of the stagey acting of the rest of the cast. On-line, you can find an amusing screen-test for the film between her and Hitch where you hear that her own slightly accented voice was perfectly serviceable and preferable to the Betty Boop overdub she gets here. I guess that Garbo's was the one foreign voice permissible in movies at the time.

All in all, considering when it was made and the limitations with which Hitchcock was working, this turned out to be an entertaining early film containing much promise for the future.

I think it's fair to say that he certainly delivered on that score.

I'm a history buff with a particular interest in American presidential history. Check out the Washington Post's "Presidential" and Iain Dale's "Presidents, Prime Ministers, Monarchs and Dictators" podcasts, both of which I highly recommend. That's where I first learned about the tragic story of the nation's 20th President, James Garfield, one of four presidents to be assassinated in office. Like William McKinley after him and obviously unlike Lincoln and JFK, even the manner of his death didn't make Garfield much better known, but his story deserves to be told and not just because of the way in which his time in office was ended.

Like Lincoln, he was the epitome of a log-cabin president when he surprisingly, not least to himself, emerged from the backwoods of Ohio as the compromise candidate for the Republican ticket at the 1880 election. He then went on to win against his Democratic rival but walked into a position which for years had been controlled by the party machine in the pocket of the formidable New York senator Roscoe Conkling. Conkling thought he could beat down this idealistic country hick to do his bidding especially when his own man, Chester Arthur, was made Vice President.

We watch as Garfield finds his feet in the job and starts to implement an agenda which will see the end of the notorious spoils system as well as recognising the rights of the till then sublimated black population.

Sadly the life of this decent, principled man was cut down by the delusional Charles Guiteau, a fantasist who believed that the President would grant his petition for an ambassadorial position abroad, perceiving his rejection as a personal slight to the extent that it drove him to assassination.

This four-part Netflix dramatisation tells the story in lively fashion. There's none of the fustiness usually associated with this type of production with its vivid evocation of the era, and especially its depiction of larger than life characters like Conkling and Arthur. The narrative perspective constantly switches between that of Garfield and Guiteau, until fate calamitously brings them together.

Yes, some of the dialogue betrays modern day origins, with way too much profanity, which clashes with the more archaic language and manners of the times, but I suspect this was a deliberate ploy to catch the ear of today's audiences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in shining a light on this dark and lesser-known chapter of American history, there's a lot of history-telling exposition with at times more than a little man- and indeed woman-splaining on board, but then of course, maybe with my recent listenings, I also didn't need to absorb the amount of factual detail and justifications presented at times, even as I accept it may have helped the understanding of those not familiar with the subject matter. I also suspected a number of apocryphal encounters inserted into the story for dramatic effect (did the late President's wife really meet with the condemned Guiteau in his cell, just before his execution?). Not quite fake-news but possibly worth a fact-check or two...

The four lead parts of Garfield, Conkling, Arthur and Guiteau are skilfully and vividly played by Michael Shannon, Shea Whigham, Nick Offerman and particularly Matthew McFadyen as the deluded assassin.

The questions of corruption and power-broking in the White House are, of course, very much still with us today some 150 years later, a reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun. Personally, from my readings and listenings on the subject of the history of American presidents, I'm sure there are many other interesting stories to tell like this one.

As regards this entertaining production, if it also helps rehabilitate the reputation of a bold, principled but cruelly cut-down man like President Garfield as well as reminding us of the decorum with which past White House incumbents used to uphold the office, then personally, I'm all for it.

So I've uncovered a list of the ten scariest and most suspenseful children's programmes on British television, something which has fascinated me since my own days of watching Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee's Dr Who, The Tomorrow People and Ace of Wands. This 6 part series aired in the late 70s when I'd moved on from my childhood leanings, but I must say catching up with it today. I found it to be an effective and watchable series.

Yes it is very setbound, with all the action taking place in the actual Clifton house itself and some of the acting is a little bit stiff and awkward with some fluffed lines here and there, but the effects are pretty good considering the time and likely budget available. The story itself has enough spookiness about it, which coupled with a genuine historical basis in fact, combined to make this an informative and entertaining watch.

Peter Sallis, of "Last of the Summer Wine" fame, is probably the most recognisable face here and puts in an enthusiastic performance as a middle-aged ghostbuster. The direction however is pretty static throughout with little imagination shown, but the strength of the story itself, helped by some atmospheric incidental music and ghostly interludes just about carries it through.

James Cagney's brother produced this early 50's gangster movie so he can hardly complain about being type-cast again as a gangland boss. It may not be quite as white-hot as "White Heat", but despite some major plot inconsistencies, it still manages to raise the temperature.

Like many a film-noir before, it kicks into life with an arguably unnecessary near-movie-length flashback as we're introduced to seven individuals on trial for murder-related crimes with the immediate reveal of Cagney's character's absence before he's even made an appearance, effectively sealing his eventual fate well in advance.

Never mind, when he does pop up, he dominates proceedings from first to last. Like Cody Jarrett, we see his Ralph Cotter character bust his way out of jail, cold-bloodedly sacrificing his escape-partner in the process. He then hooks up with the dead man's grieving young sister who doesn't know he killed her brother, even as he hatches up a small warm-up robbery in preparation for a much bigger heist on a rival mobster's operation. Leaned on by Ward Bond and Barton MacClane's pair of crooked cops, he craftily blackmails them into becoming his accomplices, along with a more willing shady solicitor played by Luther Adler.

Then Cotter comes across jaded society girl, Margaret, played by Helena Carter, who likes the bit of rough she sees in him. The daughter of the richest and most powerful man in town, it remains to be seen whether Cotter can appease the two girls in his life, pull off his big score and keep ahead of the law.

Cagney is still magnetic to watch, even at age 50, but even I struggled to accept he could so quickly and easily ensnare two such pretty young women. I also found the sub-plot involving Margaret and her father to be over-contrived, indeed I'd go further and say a few of the other plot twists also strained credibility too far. The film also lacks the powerhouse finish of "White Heat" despite some sharp direction by Gordon Douglas, who went on to make a number of realistically tough crime features in the late 60's, often starring Frank Sinatra.

This one's worth catching principally for Cagney's star turn but the great man undoubtedly made better films in this genre with which he's so keenly associated.

When I was growing up my dad would always buy three Sunday newspapers, two Scottish tabloids and one English broadsheet. I'm glad to say the latter was never the "News of the World" which even then, in the 60's and 70's had a reputation as a scandal sheet as it relentlessy exposed randy reverends and promiscuous politicians it seemed to the exclusion of the actual hard news of the day. Back then it bought its exclusives, paying money under-the-table to informants with what was known as cheque-book journalism, but jump forward to the early 21st century and they went lower still, actually hacking in to the private mobile phone accounts of targetted individuals for the revelatory stories which had the subjects wondering which of their families, friends or contacts were betraying their confidences, when in truth it was the gutter-journalism of a national newspaper which was behind it all the time, invading their confidential phone accounts.

The exposure of the paper's nefarious practices came to light largely through the efforts of two men, firstly the crusading journalist of "The Guardian" UK broadsheet, Nick Davies and the other, insider senior police officer DCS Dave Cook. Personally speaking I couldn't get too excited or upset about some lurid titbit spread across the "News of the Screws" concerning a Royal or a film or TV star, but when it touched into an unsolved murder investigation with a suspected gangland killing (by a hatchet embedded in his head!) of a private investigator Daniel Morgan and in particular later on when it emerged that the paper had actually hacked into the account of thirteen-year-old murder victim Millie Dowler, clearly things had gotten way out of control.

When the Dowler hack was exposed, the accusing finger of blame and accountability went all the way up to its past and current editors Andy Coulson (who'd since moved on to become Prime Minister David Cameron's Press Officer) and Rebekah Brooks, and ultimately of course to the paper's owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who at the time was trying to separately engineer the ownership of the BSkyB news corporation.

The story is a long and winding one to be sure, picking up and dropping down along the way an unusual mix of characters indeed, including senior football administrator David Davies, the since disgraced, jailed and indeed deceased convicted PA guru Max Clifford and the orgiastic Formula One supremo Max Mosely. However, it proved far more interesting and involving when it turned to the Daniel Morgan and Millie Dowler cases.

Perhaps deliberately, the series was presented in a sometimes flashy, trashy, tabloidy way with David Tennant as Davies acting as narrator, breaking the fourth wall with asides directly to the camera and several vaguely surreal scenes where we see him accompanied by an imagined mariachi band at one point or when we see a newspaper awards gala descend into a cake-fight, but it sobers up in time for the denouement, winding up episode 6 with a sudden accelerated wind-up of the hacking story's eventual exposure and the consequences, or lack of same, for its main protagonists.

Episode 7 dealt with the subsequent government enquiry which saw Murdoch, with son James in tow, face the music (and a custard pie!) and yet arguably still call the tune as only Coulson actually went to jail and even then for only 5 months of an 18 month sentence. Clearly, the buck at News International stopped with him and not old Rupe.

As the lengthy footnotes over the end credits reveal, almost all of the major figures implicated in News International either escaped relatively unscathed like Murdoch and Brooks or survived with only minor bruising, like Coulson.

Like I said I struggled to pay close attention to the lengthy preamble over the first few episodes, when I worried that it wasn't taking the story seriously enough, but it certainly became more gripping as it went on. It leaves the viewer in little doubt as to its opinion on Murdoch, Brooks and Coulson or the acquitted suspected murderers of Daniel Morgan.

Featured players in the production included David Tennant, giving a typically mercurial performance as Davies, even if at times, he's made to speak some loquacious dialogue, ohnothimagen Toby Jones, complete with rather silly wig, plays his sympathetic editor, but arguably the best acting was by Robert Carlyle as the tough Scottish career cop Cook, eventually broken down by the process and the equally ubiquitous Eve Myles as his wife, Detective Jacqui "Crimewatch" Haymes.

This unconventional dramatisation of one of the most significant press stories in recent British history takes some getting used to in terms of its production style, but hang in there, as, like Davies and Cook, it stays the course, to, in the end, deliver a damning indictment on the despicable working methods of the press and especially of its largely untouched orchestrators, Coulson, Brooks and especially the man at the top, Rupert Murdoch.

I accidentally came across this BBC children's TV show after finding a list of the ten scariest children's TV programmes of the 70's and 80's. I was a long way from being a child when it first appeared on the channel back in 1988 so I missed it at the time and honestly wasn't even aware of its existence, but intrigued by its premise, I determined to track it down, which I duly did, enabling me to watch its surprisingly well-preserved six episodes.

Based on a popular children's novel by the author Helen Cresswell, it centres on a mid-teen girl Minty (apparently short for Aramint!) whose mother is involved in a car accident and ends up in a life-or-death comatose state. Minty was already staying at the time at the cottage of her elderly godmother and as an only child, takes the news very hard.

To occupy her time, she visits the nearby Belton Estate, with its old manor house and fantastic rolling grounds complete with age-worn statues. She gets into conversation with the aged caretaker who goes by the strange name of World, who instinctively senses her connection to what he believes are the ghostly manifestations of young children who were once connected to the estate, either through family or enforced child labour. When he tells her this and that she must be the one to set the children free, she's initially sceptical but when she falls asleep next to one of the statues of a moondial, she's astounded to waken up in the same place a centrury before. She immediately encounters a young Cockney servant boy, Tom, who can see, speak to and even touch her. Although in poor health, he's the only member of the extensive household who can interact with Minty, thus identifying him as one of the trapped spirits Minty has to help. He reveals to her that he has a younger sister, Dorrie, also in service, and also in failing health with whom he's desperate to join up again.

Soon afterwards the pair manifest together in the Georgian Era another hundred years before, where they witness a young girl being persecuted by a group of fellow-children as well as her beastly guardian, Mrs Vole, who calls her the Devil's Child, apparently solely because of the large birthmark on her face.

With every step back in time, Tom's health worsens. Minty visits her comatose mother in hospital, tape-recording and playing to her her adventures, hoping she'll get through to her and bring her back to the land of the living. As Halloween approaches, Minty senses time is running out to save both the children and her mother and plus just who is the mysterious and sinister Mrs Raven who settles into the B & B and apparently is intent on hindering Minty's efforts. It surely can't be a coincidence that she greatly resembles young Sarah's tormentor, the nasty Mrs Vole?

Atmospherically filmed, with a suitably spooky soundtrack, I was thoroughly captivated by this supernatural tale, which for me had echoes of a favourite British movie of the 70's, Lionel Jeffries' "The Amazing Mr Blunden" as well as of classic Victorian-era stories by the likes of Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Young Siri Neal with her Kate Bush "Lionheart" locks and Tony Sands as young Tom are very natural in their roles and get good support from Jacqueline Pearce as the villainous Mrs Vole / Raven and Arthur Hewlett as old World. Directed with style and finesse by children's TV specialist Colin Cant, he concocts particularly striking sequences for both the title credits and within the actual programme, the time-travel elements, or are they just dream-sequences...?

Now to look out and view the other entries in the original list, I can only hope they meet the high standard set by this series.

This 1957 feature stars James Cagney in a grand, melodramatic if inevitably romanticised biography of early Hollywood actor Lon Chaney.

As we join the film, we already see his star rising on the Los Angeles theatrical curcuit performing slapstick and song and dance routines in Vaudeville. Married to Dorothy Malone's stage-singer Cleve character, all seems well for the hard-working couple. She falls pregnant but is horrified to learn at first meeting that both of Chaney's parents are deaf mutes, worrying that their unborn child will be born the same way, in what today comes across as a ludicrous over-reaction. From there, even after their son Lon Jr is born, the marriage breaks down, with each suspecting the other of infidelity culminating in Cleve histrionically swallowing acid on stage, ruining her singing career in the process and causing a permanent split between the two.

How Chaney moves on from there, making his way through the ranks at Hollywood, finding new love in a second marriage to Jane Greer's supportive chorus girl Hazel and then managing his tricky relationship with his growing son, who against his wishes, also wants to become an actor, all the way to his early death in 1930, comprises the meat of the movie, especially when a reformed and now repentant Cleve comes back on the scene to re-connect with her boy, although you have to wonder if she'd have done so if Junior had indeed been born deaf and dumb.

Cagney delivers another bravura performance, whether clowning and tap-dancing onstage, wearing grotesque make-up, or even practicing sign-language, he's brimful of his trademark energy throughout but also knows when to bring in the pathos. He's well supported by Malone, who undergoes quite the character arc from unsympathetic egoist to caring mother figure and Greer as Chaney's loyal and stable second wife.

Offering some interesting backstage insights along the way, it ends on a deathbed scene involving a moving passing-the-torch conclusion which even remembers to close the circle with a little sign-language too.

Stylishly directed by future "Star Trek" TV director Joseph Pevney, this old-fashioned entertainment will have you made up in no time.

Cillian Murphy went from his Oscar-winning appearance in the mega-budget blockbuster "Oppenheimer" to this slow-burning low-budget, enigmatically titled drama highlighting the abuses carried out in the now notorious Houses of Magdalene. Run by nuns, these were institutions primarily in the Republic of Ireland to where young "fallen women" were sent by their scandalised families for "correction" and subjected to horrendous treatment with their babies given up for adoption from birth. Although not exclusive to Ireland, these workhouses persisted with their inhumane practices there until the late 90's, far longer than anywhere else due to the lingerong general subserviance to the Catholic church, when they were finally brought to light, creating a huge national furore at the time.

It's the mid-80's in the county of Waterford and Murphy plays John Furlong, a hard-working coal merchant. A man of few words, we nevertheless see him as a fair employer and a faithful husband and warm family man, father to four daughters. Not that he's flush with money, they all live in a cramped flat just above the breadline but that doesn't stop him being charitable in his modest way to those below him in the food chain.

On one of his regular deliveries to the local House of Magdalene, he accidentally stumbles on the reality of life for the young women there. What he sees sparks his own childhood memories where we learn that his abandoned mother was taken in by a benevolent wealthy local woman, rather than sent to a Magdalene house. Even though the young John tragically lost his mum when he was still an infant, clearly both their lives would have been markedly different if she'd been forced into the convent.

Now suspicious of the malpractices he believes are committed there, he's horrified to discover one young pregnant woman locked in a coal bunker. How the awakening conscience of this quiet man responds to this shocking situation, to the backdrop of the rest of the local population living in passive thrall to these cruel goings-on in their community under the steely dominion of the Mother Superior, informs the eventual resolution of the film which is done in a quietly understated manner befitting all that's gone before.

Peter Mullan's 2002 "The Magdalen Sisters" film was, as I recall, much more explicit in its excoriation of the shocking practices of these shameful facilities but this feature, in its low-key way, I found to be equally effective. Filmed in grainy, muted tones, with only a minimalistic soundtrack, the film achieves a realistic depiction of the era. In its most memorable sequence, we see Furlong in a tense and awkward sit-down interview in the warm sitting room of the Mother Superior as she blatantly seeks to allay his discomfort at what he knows he's just seen.

A film of few words, whilst it moves at a relatively slow pace, it nonetheless gets across its powerful message with a combination of suitably sensitive direction and the intuitive, natural acting of the cast, particularly by Murphy in the lead.

Based on the popular novels by A A Dhand, Virdee is a tense, action-packed, if highly improbable 6-part detective series set in modern-day Bradford. Bradford is well-known as having one of the highest concentration of Asian inhabitants in the UK, with the programme very much set in that community and within it, different sub-categories based on religion. This in turn drives a major plot-point in the narrative.

Senior police detective Hardeep "Harry" Virdee is the titular maverick detective with his own individual and dynamic approach to catching criminals. He's naturally called up by his female commanding officer when a mysterious serial killer starts executing prominent Asians in a particularly grisly fashion, leaving the word "parasite" daubed on the walls of the crime-scene and even inserting live moth-eggs inside the sealed eye-lids of one of the victims to enhance the point. When the perpetrator next kidnaps Harry's younger female crime-reporter cousin along with a retired DCI's teenage son, it gradually emerges that the ultimate goal of the killer is Harry himself.

Behind the scenes, there are an improbable set of coincidental, interlinked connections. Harry, of the Sikh religion, is happily married to his wife Saima of the Muslim faith which Harry's unforgiving, old-fashionef father just will not tolerate, publicly rejecting and then crudely humiliating him when he makes a self-debasing attempt at reconciliation.

As if that wasn't enough, Harry has a dark childhood secret which binds him to his wife's brother Riaz, who, while Harry has devoted himself to crime prevention, has instead gone to the dark side and risen to become a crime lord in Bradford in direct competition with an Eastern European gang led by a hairy-faced boss named Vasil. Mix up all these elements, throw in another major character who romantically connects Riaz with the new killer in town and stir in cliff-hanging scenes a-plenty, lots of violence and strained loyalties and you have a super-charged, over-the-top show, if it even knew where the top was.

Virdee comes across as a latter day successor to his brother-cop John Luther and if you liked the dark intrigue and convoluted plotting of that particular series, then this one is for you.

Me, I enjoyed the thrills and spills I encountered here even as I frequently had to suspend disbelief as one haphazard plot construct fed and often bled into another. Personally, though, I could have down without the background Virdee family soap-opera which played out alongside all the front and centre "Se7en"-type crime stuff.

Staz Nair is very good as the conflicted Virdee and is well supported by Aysha Kala as his devoted, if long-suffering wife who plays a key if yet again hugely coincidental role in reconciling Harry and his dad and Vikash Bhai as bad brother(in-law) Riaz. Making good use of actual locations in Bradford, along the way providing interesting insights into family relationships in the Asian community and most of all delivering on rollercoaster thrills and spills, it seems we have a new superbad cop in town with more than enough loose ends remaining outside to indicate more to come in the future.

This Halloween I've been watching a number of well-known movies I'd not seen before, associated with the season, mainly on account of horror films not being my favourite genre. It therefore seemed natural to finish up with John Carpenter's hugely successful and influential "Halloween".

Clearly drawing on precedents, especially Hitchcock's "Psycho" and the use of atmospheric electronic music in "The Exorcist", it makes a virtue of its small-budget necessity, employing mostly inexperienced young actors and limited, everyday locations to good effect.

Right from the beginning, Carpenter displays a sureness in his own ability, easing into the action over his own musical theme and straight away utilising an extended subjective shot behind what we soon learn is a child's mask, leading up to a shocking sororicide and subsequent reveal of the killer's identity, all this happening on the eve of Halloween.

Fast forward 15 years and it's that time of year again. The child killer has grown to adulthood and has, wouldn't you know it, chosen the same time of year to escape the not-so-secure medical facility confining him, despite the efforts of the doctor who helped put him away years ago, played by Donsld Pleasence. You know that Michael Myers has only one thing on his mind, meaning it's going to be a bloody Halloween for the young citizens of the fictional Illinois suburb named Haddonfield.

I'll be frank and call out the poor dialogue, plot development and acting in the movie. All of the youngsters act stiffly and woodenly, and I include debutant Jamie Lee Curtis in that, but they're not helped by a corny, clichéd script. Pleasence does confer some heft to proceedings but his screen time is limited, likely due to budget constraints.

But putting all that aside, there's no denying Carpenter's abiity to set up scenes with his use of establishing mid and long-range shots before cutting quickly to jolting scenes and immersive steady-cam takes for the pursuit scenes. Even simple things like the sound of the killer's heavy breathing and use of, of all things, a painted-over Captain Kirk mask from "Star Trek", add greatly to the air of menace and dread.

Who knew the slew of sequels that would follow down the years or the spate of copycat "slasher" movies which would follow in its wake, but certainly the original "Halloween" still turns a few tricks and treats for the viewer, even today.

Horror films aren't really my thing, but this Halloween I've decided to steel myself and watch a number of popular scary classics I purposely avoided when I was younger. Of course, it was probably the success of "The Exorcist" which triggered a spate of devil-inspired features, including this highly successful Richard Donner-directed movie starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick.

Peck and Remick are an American couple who despite the obvious age-gap between them, are keen to have a baby. He's a senior American diplomat and while in Italy, she sadly miscarries their child at the birthing moment. At this point, old Gregory really should have remembered the old saying "Beware of Italian priests bearing gifts" but, presented with another baby born in a scenario the opposite to their own, the mother failing to survive the birth of her newborn son, he accepts the baby boy as their own, lying to his wife that her pregnancy had in fact succeeded.

Soon afterwards, Peck's John Thorn accepts his dream gig as UK Ambassador, a possible stepping stone to the White House itself, and he and his family are soon esconced in a grand old English country house, with a retinue of staff, including a nanny for baby Damien. However, in a portent of things to come, the young woman commits a shockingly public suicide at the child's birthday party.

From there on, tension mounts as Remick's Katharine picks up on the bad vibes around her "son", their domestic situation not helped by the couple sleepwalking into accepting the services of Billie Whitelaw's sinister replacement nanny. Meanwhile, Peck is being pestered by a troubled priest, Patrick Troughton, who warns him of approaching evil but who then suffers his own grisly death, although there's more where that came from later on. Now suspicious of Damien's true nature, and especially after his wife has a near-fatal accident at their home, with the help of press photographer David Warner, he embarks on a search which will take him back to Italy and onto Israel and reveal the shocking truth of his adopted son and determine what he must do next.

Director Donner cleverly inserts the shock-sequences at regular intervals to keep the audience alert and is helped by his experienced cast who ground the increasingly unlikely events in reality. Jerry Goldsmith's Orff-inspired choral score adds greatly to the atmosphere as the movie hurtles toward its conclusion, with the graveside epilogue and the little boy's enigmatic smile to the camera, making for an aptly menacing ending as well as leaving the door open for the inevitable sequels.

While I personally didn't find it as scary a movie as "The Exorcist", I nevertheless enjoyed this well-directed and acted addition to the horror genre, which no doubt poisoned the use of the name Damien for a generation of baby sons to come.

This capable thriller was an early directorial feature by Michael Crichton and included something of a cinematic break-out performance by Michael Douglas, after years of TV stardom in "The Streets of San Francisco".

The plot is certainly credible, centring on a major, apparently respectable American hospital, it concerns the black market for body parts although the twist here is that the victims aren't actually dead yet. Invariably young, healthy individuals of either sex, admitted for seemingly non-life-threatening procedures, they inexplicably fall into a comatose state after the routine application of gas during the anaesthetic process.

When a young female doctor, played by Genevieve Bujold, sees her girl-friend become one such victim, closely followed by another perfectly healthy male, played by Tom Selleck in a minor role, she becomes suspicious and begins to investigate, inevitably putting herself in danger as she tracks the conspiracy all the way to the top. Could her on-off boyfriend, fellow-doctor Michael Douglas, be involved in the nefarious proceedings and should she really be trusting the paternal hospital director played by Richard Widmark?

Although there were some unlikely plot-jumps, and some padding here and there, plus I felt the ending could have been more dynamic, the film has much to commend it, not least that for once a woman was the main protagonist.

Crichton displays his flair for thrills and scares as he effectively turns a deserted hospital into a monolithic house of horror with Bujold climbing up great heights, clambering along confined spaces and running breakneck through endless corridors overviewed and pursued by security guards. He also conjures up memorable scenes, like the death-by-electrocution of a suspicious maintenance-man and especially when Bujold is chased into the abbatoir-like room where the bodies are eerily suspended in mid-air awaiting processing. I also liked the teaser insertion early on in the film of Bujold consulting a young boy who requires a kidney transplant but who will have to wait for a donor to come along.

Bujold makes for an affecting, vulnerable but in the end spirited lead and is ably supported by the emergent Douglas and old-hand Widmark, although I was also taken by Elizabeth Ashley as the sinister Nurse Emerson.

Meanwhile, I think I'll just postpone that routine hospital check-up I was planning...

I have a vague childhood memory of bookstands at newsagents, bulging with paperback novels in the mid-sixties and there always seemed to be two best-sellers ever-present on display. One was Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" and the other was invariably the original novel of this movie, written of course by Harold Robbins.

Both books ironically enough spawned hugely successful (at least in terms of box-office) Hollywood dramatisations which nevertheless frequently make the lists of the worst movies ever made. I thus couldn't resist rubber-necking "The Carpetbaggers" to see if this really was the car crash the critics claim it to be.

It's set in the Roaring Twenties, a dog-eat-dog decade, where the biggest and baddest king of the jungle is George Peppard's Jonas Cord character, a very thinly-drawn facsimile of Howard Hughes, famous or infamous for his exploits in the early days of both Hollywood and commercial aviation.

Taking his cue from his megalomaniacal dad, Jonas steps into the old man's shoes and indeed slippers when the old man conveniently dies suddenly, mid-rant, of a heart attack. We learn that Jonas has already had an affair with his own stepmum, Carroll Baker's young blonde bombshell Rina Marlowe (rhymes with Jean Harlow) character but he brushes off her advances in order to focus on bigging himself up as a business mogul, buying out the remaining board members to gain complete mastery of the air, so to speak. On his flight-path, he ruthlessly takes down his main competition, casually exploiting the unrequited love of his rival's daughter, played by Elizabeth Ashley, by marrying her, fathering a daughter and then effectively abandoning her.

Meanwhile, his long-standing almost filial respect and friendship with a middle-aged former Wild West cowboy, Nevada Smith, played by Alan Ladd in his last screen role before his early death, leads him into the movie business just at the time of the arrival of the talkies. Of course, Jonas doesn't do things by half and ends up buying out an existing studio and then takes over the direction of his very first production, in the process, just like in the movies, making Rena the lead, where of course she becomes a major star.

From there on, we follow Jonas's journey as he rampages his rollercoaster way, both hell and money-raising as he goes, caring not a jot about who he tramples on in his way.

Edward Dmytryk I have no time for as a person given his cowardly turncoat act of self-preservation during the Blacklist of the early 50's but he has made some fine films in his time, particularly in the noir genre. Here, however, I didn't detect any discernable directorial style at all. I almost got the impression he made the film by reading a few pages of the book at a time, then filming them. The editing is poor, the continuity shoddy and the camera-work flat and uninspiring. I don't know if the redemptive ending reflects the book or audience opinions at test screenings, but it struck me as pandering and lacking credibility.

As for the acting, Peppard does his best to hold the movie together by playing the nmonstrous Cord to the hilt, but elsewhere there are some, to say the least, unusual casting choices, especially Robert Cummings as a cynical Mr 10% agent and Ladd as Cord's only remaining confidante, until he loses confidence in him too.

I'm not likely to ever read the source novel, but as a movie I found this adaptation shallow, crude and frankly, a bit all over the place.

Just not my carpetbag, I guess.

No doubt the producers of this entertaining 6-part ITV series were delighted with the coincidence of the brazen jewellery robbery carried out at the Louvre midway through the show's run. "Frauds" teams two leading contemporary English actresses, Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker in a "Thelma and Louise" meets "Bonnie and Clyde" (or should that be "Bonnie and Bonnie?) - type heist caper with a Spanish twist.

As the title makes clear, the duo are a pair of middle-aged career confidence tricksters who worked together until they were finally busted in a police sting operation where Whittaker's Sam character was forced by the police into giving up Jones's Bert character who then unknowingly took the rap for the two of them, to wit, a ten year prison sentence leaving Sam free on the outside.

As we join the action, we see Jones saying adios to her swarthy Spanish prison guard and personal nurse as she leaves the prison on compassionate grounds with a terminal cancer diagnosis. There to meet her is Sam who takes her to her Spanish finca. Sam has given up the criminal life, devoting herself instead to trying to track down the whereabouts of the daughter she gave up for adoption over 20 years ago. Apparently she and Bert made quite a team before the bust, but always had a stormy relationship. Despite her better judgment, fuelled by guilt over her part in putting Bert inside as well as sympathy for her condition, she's happy to be her carer until she passes.

However, Bert has two big surprises for her, actually, it's three, but the final one will wait until much later in the series. The first one is she's cooked up the theft of a near priceless Dali painting from a Madrid museum and secondly she's tracked down Sam's long-lost daughter to a nearby restaurant where she's waiting tables.

It seems that Bert is determined to go out with a bang and so she assembles the rest of the gang she'll need to pull off the job, besides Sam. First up is their regular female carpenter, needed to prepare the necessary rig for the job, who's now working as a stage assistant to her philandering magician husband. Next is a young Indian master-forger who brings extra heat due to his serious gambling habit. Then there's her prison guard lover who smells a money-making opportunity and finally Sam's daughter Caitlin, who seems to have inherited a lot of her old mum's confidence tricks.

Take all these ingredients, mix them all up, add in a double-cross or two and a twist or three, especially at the end as you'd expect, which of itself left plenty of scope for a follow-the-money follow-up.

Very much a girl-power production, including the writing and direction, it's no surprise that Jones and Whittaker's characters usurp men's names or that all of the men in the cast are wholly outshone and indeed often subservient to the deadlier species.

Slick, fast moving and suspenseful when it needed to be, even if the extended theft sequence may not have exactly been "Topkapi", with a healthy dollop of earthy humour added in for good measure, it still managed to be a refreshingly off-beat entertainment which made a welcome change from the more usual true-life crime recreation or contrived murder mystery series which more usually fill this time-slot.

So my wife and I have been invited to a Halloween costume party next week by our Spanish neighbours and in case you didn't know, the prevailing theme here is very much horror-based. After much casting about, my wife decided we are to go as Mr and Mrs Beetlejuice, which meant, in the interests of research as much as anything else that we felt obliged to rewatch the original feature for the first time since it shocked-up in 1988.

It's still highly amusing in its very disjointed way, centring as it does on the clever reverse-"The Exorcist" concept of a pair of ghosts employing a "professional" zombie to expunge their old, beloved rickety house of its new inhabitants. I also detected nods to Hitchcock, most obviously the "Psycho" haunted house and "Don't go up to the attic!" vibe of "The Birds" but also in the Dali-esque nightmare landscape of "Spellbound" not to mention look-ins for "Poltergeist", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "The Addams Family" with Winona Ryder as a proto-Wednesday and especially "The Rocky Horror Show" with Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as an undead Brad and Janet.

I understand that director Tim Burton made a virtue of necessity by unashamedly exposing the limitations of his budget, which can clearly be seen in some not-so-special effects and clumsy back-projections but elsewhere he still manages to demonstrate his vivid imagination and black humour to great effect.

Star of the show is obviously Michael Keaton's brilliant turn as the madcap title-character who comes across like some crazy-composite Marx Brother, but everyone else clearly enters into the fun, including Catherine O'Hara, Robert Goulet and especially the wonderfully deadpan (accent on dead) Sylvia Sydney as a chain-smoking ghostess with the mostest.

You do miss when Keaton's not on screen, (apparently he only gets 18 minutes in total) and it does feel a little stretched at times, but with memorable set-pieces like the zombie waiting-room or the super-silly dinner-party group-rendition of "The Banana Boat Song", it's undoubtedly become a seasonal classic.

And now at least I know why Spotify includes Harry Belafonte of all people in its suggested Halloween playlist...

I must look out more films by the late Jean Harlow, but of those I have seen, regardless of the quality of the film itself, she has invariably been a captivating presence. Sexy, sassy and occasionally shocking, she was the original blonde bombshell who proved extremely popular with Depression-era audiences until her untimely death aged only 26 in 1936.

This 1965 biopic starring Carroll Baker in the title role seems to me to fail its subject in so many ways. As well as altering or omitting large portions of her admittedly eventful life, like the fact she was actually married three times in all, had affairs with known gangsters and was engaged to fellow star William Powell at the time of her death, not to mention even getting her cause of death wrong, it's plagued by casting errors, quite awful dialogue and weak, showy direction.

Just on the casting choices, you have to wonder who signed off on picking the tall, bulky and well-known playboy Peter Lawford as Harlow's doomed short-in-stature second-husband Paul Bern, who apparently committed suicide and left a note referring to his impotence, or selected the wholesome Angela Lansbury play the star's possessive, sex-crazy mother Mama Jean or a dark-haired Leslie Nielsen play a thinly-disguised, predatory Howard Hughes. Sad to say but the worst of them all is probably that of Miss Baker, who literally plays her wig and clothes and gets nowhere near the sex-appeal or comedic smarts of the real Jean.

Then there's the odd spectacle of the film's interpolating real-characters like Bern and Arthur Landau, the latter even more confusingly portrayed as Harlow's supportive agent when in real-life he was a writer, with created character-counterparts of prominent players like Gable, Louis B Mayer and the afore-mentioned Hughes. Even the titles of her most famous movies are surreptitiously altered which only adds to the general confusion.

Gordon Douglas's direction is flat, uninspired and unfocused employing over-opulent sets and unsuitable, intrusive background music in a failed attempt to add some warmth and class to proceedings.

I really can't remember watching such an inaccurate and poorly made bio-pic which does such a disservice to the memory of the screen legend which was Harlow.

Ultimately she deserves a far better tribute than this tawdry effort.

I've watched the five series of the BBC's successful "Race Across the World" programme to date, all featuring members of the public so I guess it was inevitable that a celebrity version would follow. I always have to qualify the word celebrity as clearly my definition of the word is different to the programme planners on TV channels.

There were four, as opposed to the usual six starting couples, which meant that none of the teams had to drop out of the race after a few stages as occurs in the main series. The celebrity journey itself was also shorter on distance and therefore of less duration, 4 as opposed to six weeks, although I don't doubt that they were still taxing to the participants.

The teams comprised All Saints' singer Melanie Blatt and her mother, McFly drummer Harry Judd and his mother, the paraplegic young racing-car-driver-turned pundit Billy Monger and his sister Bonny and finally TV weather presenter, Alex Beresford and his father Noel. I was vaguely aware of who the first two celebrities were, but only from their appearances in other celebrity shows such as "Celebrity Masterchef" or "Strictly Come Dancing". The other two I hadn't heard of at all and knew not ond thing about. I suppose, in one sense, this helped me to enjoy the programme a little more than I usually do these celebrity jollies, as it meant that I could treat them almost like the everyday members of the public you see in the non-celebrity programmes.

Over six, as opposed to the more usual ten episodes, the couples had to make their way by land from Marrakech in Morocco to Tromso in Norway. The format was pretty much the same as before and again I quite enjoyed dropping in on their travels and in particular seeing some of the sites and experiences they took in along the way.

There didn't appear to be too many mishaps befalling the participants on their journeys, apart from one occasion when Blatt Junior somehow managed to get on a train without checking her mother was with her, but it was easily resolved. I was pleased to see an absence of the ritual demeaning begging ritual for free accommodation / transport seen in all thd other series. As ever there was lots of chat about bonding and reconnecting with one another, pride in each other's achievements and the odd minor disagreement too. Also, as usual, there were one or two people who ended up being something of an irritant, for me that was indeed Melanie Blatt, but on the whole the people here were inoffensive and didn't seem too self obsessed.

Less compelling than the normal series, you got the impression that if things had got too tough any one of them might well have said, "I'm a celebrity, get me out of here!", but no-one really came to that at any point. In a way, something like that actually did occur which certainly made for a major surprise going into the final epidode.

The race-ending in the frozen north at the top of a chairlift station for once wasn't contrived as there really was a photo-finish this time evrn though, with all the racers being minor celebrities, you kind of knew that nothing was really at stake for any of them. Thaf said, while I personally abhor any show with the word celebrity in it, this was as watchable as the non-celeb series seen before, so that no doubt I'll overcome my natural prejudices and watch the inevitable second series to come.

I was only 12 or 13 when "The Exorcist" was first released and of course, being an X-certificate, I couldn't have got in to see it even if I'd wanted to. I do, however, remember the attendant publicity of the time, terming it the scariest film ever, which coupled with my personal aversion to most things horror, has prevented me watching it ever sjnce. Until now, that is, when my wife nominated it as a Halloween-related movie for us go watch, so, putting on my big-boy pants, I finally steeled myself to seeing it.

I have to admit, I was impressed. Adapted by William P Blatty from his best-selling novel, it is, in more ways than one, a chilling watch as we witness the possession of 12-year-old Linda Blair's Regan character by the devil himself. Quite how old Satan hops over from Nineveh into this innocent young girl's body isn't made exactly clear, but it's irrelevant in any case, as after a slow beginning which separately introduces all the major characters, all hell literally breaks loose when the devil really starts to manifest, much to the concern of the girl's mother, Ellen Burstyn's popular actress character.

Director William Friedkin patiently builds up the tension, inserting subliminal suggestions of the demon and then of course utilising a range of eye-popping make-up and visual special effects as Regan is gradually taken over. Much parodied subsequently, I have to admit that the famous scenes of this innocent little girl projectile vomiting, rotating her head, levitating, speaking vile epithets and especially the "spider-walk" downstairs, certainly shocked me in my seat.

The climactic scene of the exorcism where the doubting faith of both Max von Sydow's elderly priest and his younger assistant played by Jason Miller is put to the ultimate test to try to save the tortured teen, is a real tour-de-force as the battle between good and evil for one young girl's soul takes place in her ice-cold bedroom, resulting in a shattering conclusion.

Eschewing star names in the cast, even if the action does revolve around an obviously wealthy movie star who lives in an expensive house, aided by her domestic staff, Friedkin nevertheless successfully conveys the mundane, everyday backdrop to better highlight these extraordinary events. The use of background music is similarly sparing and he coaxes strong performances from Von Sydow, no stranger to supernatural encounters of course, Miller and especially young Blair.

In closing, perhaps it's just as well I didn't get to see it as a boy, as it may well have put me off horror films for life if I had.

Hollywood history is littered with stories of young girls, some of them child-stars, chewed up and spat out again by the studio system. The most famous example was probably Judy Garland, but others which come to mind include Frances Farmer, Carole Landis, Marilyn of course and indeed Natalie Wood herself. It's shocking and indeed disturbing to be aware that she was required to act out an attempted suicide scene on this movie, not long after doing so for real in her personal life, even if we don't know if the producers here were aware of it.

She plays the Daisy Clover of the title, a sort of Mary Pickford meets Judy Garland type who's plhcked from poverty and groomed for stardom in the mid-Depression era Mid-West where she lives in a static trailer with her increasingly wandered elderly single parent Ruth Gordon. Her "rescuer" is a major Hollywood studio mogul, Raymond Swan, played with icy coolness by Christopher Plummer who sees and hears something in the young waif he believes will connect with the movie-going public.

And he's right, as he and his wife raise Daisy to be the next big thing, turning her into an all-singing, all-dancing teen sensation. To protect and reinforce his protegé's wholesome image however, he coerces Daisy's feckless half-sister to keep her in line and spirits away her troublesome old mother into a care-home to keep her increasingly eccentric actions from embarrassing his star and upsetting her public image.

Friendless and lonely even at the height of her fame, Daisy finds a kindred spirit in Robert Redford's matinee idol Wade Lewis who befriends her and seems to share her growing feelings of rebellion against what the singer Joni Mitchell termed the star-maker machinery. They secretly marry, but naturally Swan turns the ensuing publicity to his advantage although we later learn that Swan has compromising information about Lewis's sexual preferences which will ensure he too knows on which side his bread is buttered where Daisy is concerned.

With Daisy pushed to her limits both physically and mentally, it becomes a question of her personal survival even as Swan threatens to squeeze every last drop of blood from her unwilling flesh. Will this particular Daisy wilt or thrive as she retreats to her beach house and ponders her future.

Robert Mulligan directed this caustic inside look at Hollywood's golden era. He often keeps the cameras at a distance from Natalie Wood as Daisy, stressing her remoteness. Unafraid to show its star having a nervous breakdown or trying to kill herself or expose its handsome male lead's same-sex tendencies, it's a refreshingly frank and bold exposé on Tinseltown.

Could it have gone deeper and darker yet and was the ending a cop-out, possibly but with an immersive lead performance by Wood, supported by Plummer's Svengali-esque villain (in stark contrast to his other starring role the same year as Baron Von Trapp in the super-saccharine "The Sound of Music") and Redford "Dear heart"-ing his way to prominence in almost a try-out for the Gatsby role he'd undertake yeads later, it nevertheless held up a black mirror on Hollywood even at the height of its early fame.

This ITV six-parter doesn't just rewrite the prescribed play-book of any number of cosy, popular, long-standing small-town murder-related series like "Murder She Wrote", "Bergerac" or the much-mocked "Midsomer Murders", to name but three, it gleefully and wantonly rips it up and shreds it. On the surface, sure, it's an identifiable-enough murder mystery featuring at its dark heart a psychopathic minister of the church whose crimes are covered up by his complicit, fellow-preacher wife, but with its lashings of black humour, mad characterisations and crazy situations, it certainly stands out from the pack.

It's probably a love it or hate it show, inviting the viewer to continually suspend disbelief as it deliberately piles up one jaw-dropping situation after another. In our household, my wife thought it was daft as it went right over her head, but I have to say that I absolutely loved it.

The casting is inspired and don't they all just love playing their roles to the hilt as murder and mayhem come to the sleepy Scottish village of Coldwater. Andrew Lincoln and Indira Varma are the London couple John and Fiona who, with their two young children and ill-fated cat Harlequin (stupid name for a cat!), have come north to save their marriage after she's had an affair and he a nervous breakdown triggered by an act of cowardly non-intervention on his part when a young mother is attacked in front of him in broad daylight by a thuggish bully.

Unfortunately for them, their new next-door neighbour is Pastor Tommy and his wife Rebecca, both played with utter mad-eyed relish by Ewen Bremner and Eve Myles. It all kicks off after John upsets an abusive young village hot-head, recalling his earlier episode and then literally runs into his tormentor again, as you do, when he goes out for an after-midnight run through the woods. You'd think the best person to help him out of his resultant jam would be holy man Tommy, but in truth this is where John's troubles really begin...

With a supporting cast featuring many familiar Scottish faces, it's a brilliantly unhinged super-charged satire which never forgets its first obligation to involve and excite the viewer. What other show would take the climactic final fight between John and Tommy and then suddenly black-out the screen mid-scene, before setting up a number of teasers for the second series which must surely come.

I may be getting carried away with myself here but with its echoes of "Pulp Fiction" and "The Shining", this was about the most fun I've had watching a crime drama all year.

I'm guessing someone saw the potential of combining Redford and Fonda, two of Hollywood's most photogenic young actors, from their appearances in the previous year's "The Chase" which primarily featured Marlon Brando. Here they're paired as the leads in a light, contemporary Neil Simon-penned comedy set in New York, based on his play, with the experienced Charles Boyer and Oscar-nominated Mildred Natwick in prominent supporting roles.

Redford is Paul Bratter, a rising young legal attorney who has just married Fonda's Corie. After they've almost broken the Plaza hotel's record for Do not Disturbing their honeymoon stay, they have to waken up to reality with him going back to work and her setting up home in their, let's be kind and call it bijou apartment, close to Washington Square Park. With a broken skylight window, a tiny bedroom which can't take a double bed and six (including the stoop!) exhausting flights of stairs to ascend before you enter it, the ice-cold flat will prove to either make or break the couple's newly-forged relationship.

Adding their straws to the camel's back are Corie's smother-mother Natwick and Boyer as their older, bohemian and rather eccentric French neighbour Victor Velasco. The crux of the movie ultimately is whether these red-hot young lovers can make a hit of married life in the freezing-cold light of day.

Rather dated in its conservative treatment of women and marriage (why can't Fonda be the breadwinner, why not have them just moving in together?) with Fonda's Corie flighty, almost flaky character totally dependent on Redford's straight-laced Paul, I'm afraid I just couldn't warm to either of them. The romance between Boyer and Natwick seemed highly contrived as we're meant to laugh at Fonda's shame and horror when she suspects her fusty old mum spending the night with an old Gallic charmer, before it finishes with Corie and Paul precariously reconnecting Harold Lloyd-style on the roof of their apartment, to the amusement of a watching crowd below.

I didn't dislike all of it. The New York settings are pleasing, Redford does a good drunk, Natwick and Boyer have fun with their interfering mum and kooky Frenchy parts and Simon pulls off some neat gags which caused me to at least smile, but Fonda's stereotypical clingy, mood-swinging Corie only irritates, the characters throughout speak in unnatural Simon-says sentences and the comedy for the most part is rather corny, just like the hokey theme tune.

I can't imagine anyone younger than 35 appreciating this movie back in the day, which for me rather misses the point, but if fluffy, cosy, conformist "comedy" is your bag, feel free to remove your shoes and socks before tiptoeing through the tulips with Bob and Jane. Be careful though, you're likely to get more than your feet wet...

This is the latest reboot of old Supes since the late Christopher Reeve first played the role in 1978 who was followed by Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill with varying degrees of success. At the present time, with audiences showing signs of superhero fatigue at the box-office, how would this latest version of Big Blue come across?

Me, I enjoyed it. I've always been more of a DC than a Marvel fan so I was rooting for it and while it ran or rather flew into the familiar clichés of recent years (CGI overload, diversity of casting, metas taking over the world ), these were offset by some pleasant surprises, especially for an old-time comic-lover like me.

It starts with a witty countdown prologue taking us from 3 million years to 3 minutes ago before a beaten-up Superman crashes to the ground from a great height. Yep, amother Meta-monster is in town, giving America's hero a hard time, controlled naturally by the ever-villainous Lex Luthor, edgily played by Nicholas Hoult. That's surprise number one, our hero in a bloody heap right at the start of the movie. Surprise number two, to a dog-lover like me, was the welcome appearance of old Krypto the Superdog to rescue his owner.

The third surprise is to learn that Superman and Lois are an item and that she knows his secret identity. Whilst we don't actually see them in bed, the clear inference is that they live together, bickering like any other couple. The fourth surprise is the appearance of the fledgling Justice League (or Gang!), comprising the punkish Guy Gardner version of Green Lantern, a petulant Hawkgirl, old Fair Play himself, Mr Terrific (wasn't he Justice Society?) and best of all Metamorpho the Element Man.

Basically you take all these ingredients, stopping only to throw in a topical allusion to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, (other global conflicts, sadly, are available), mix them all up with SFX galore, a dash of humour and a number of in-jokes here and there and hey presto, you have a satisfying super-hero romp which I hope will reestablish Superman's crowd-pleasing potential with the masses.

I liked David Corenswet as the latest actor to fill the biggest pair of underpants since Bridget Jones and he pairs off well with Rachel Brosnahan as Lois. I stopped reading Green Lantern before GG came along but I liked his characterisation here, blonde bowl-cut and all. The effects were impressive enough too, especially the latest Fortress of Solitude and Luthor's pocket universe, whatever that is. I could have done without the overlong sequence of Superman fighting a cloned version of himself plus I'm actually not mad for all the crossover stuff, but on the whole this was a welcome revival of comicdom's oldest hero and I hope he gets green-lit for another adventure or two under director James Gunn's stewardship.