Counter Culture

There’s a strong thread running through this week’s selections: power—who holds it, how it’s exercised, and what happens when it slips. From surveillance states and outlaw myths to subcultures searching for identity, the choices here circle around systems that shape behaviour, often without being seen.

Three standouts rise quickly to the surface. 🌟 Minority Report remains one of the clearest cinematic warnings about the dangers of predictive justice. 🌟 This Is England cuts deeper than almost any British film in its portrayal of belonging and vulnerability. And 🌟 Odd Man Out offers a stark, haunting study of isolation that still feels immediate.

Elsewhere, music and cultural memory run strongly through the week, from the BBC’s archive explorations to artist profiles and themed evenings. There’s also a quieter current—films and programmes that observe rather than declare, asking the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than resolve it.

Selections and writing are by Pat Harrington.

Saturday 25th April 2026

Rosaline (2022)
Film4, 2.35pmRosaline takes one of Shakespeare’s most over‑mythologised romances and tilts it just a few degrees, enough for the whole thing to look faintly ridiculous — and, in its own sly way, more human. By letting the story unfold from the vantage point of the girl Romeo loved before Juliet, the film exposes how flimsy the idea of “fated love” can be when you’re actually living through it rather than reciting it.

What keeps it buoyant is the tone: brisk, self‑aware, and happy to puncture the solemnity that usually clings to Verona. Rosaline herself is sharp, wounded, and wonderfully unimpressed by the theatrics around her. Through her eyes, the familiar beats of the tragedy become a comedy of misplaced certainty — teenagers convinced they’re experiencing eternal passion when they’re really just caught in the rush of first feelings.

Yet beneath the wit there’s a quiet intelligence. The film recognises that stories harden into legend not because they’re true, but because they’re told from the same angle for centuries. Shift the frame and the whole edifice wobbles. Rosaline never pretends to be subversive, but it understands the power of perspective — and that’s enough to give this playful retelling a little weight beneath the sparkle.

Black British Music at the BBC – Volume 2
BBC Two, 8.50pm

The second volume opens like a continuation of a conversation Britain should have been having decades ago — one where influence isn’t treated as a surprise, and where the archive stops behaving as if innovation only counts once it’s been rubber‑stamped by the mainstream. What the programme does, almost casually, is restore proportion. It shows the breadth of Black British creativity not as a footnote to the national story but as one of its engines, humming away whether the establishment noticed or not.

Some sequences feel like reclamation, others like quiet vindication. You watch artists shaping genres in real time — jungle, lovers rock, UK hip‑hop, the whole restless spectrum — and you realise how often these sounds were treated as temporary fashions rather than cultural infrastructure. The series doesn’t hammer the point; it simply lays out the evidence, clip after clip, until the omission becomes impossible to ignore.

And then there’s the emotional undertow: the joy of seeing pioneers given their due, the melancholy of recognising how long overdue that recognition is, and the thrill of watching younger artists draw from a lineage that was always there, even when the spotlight wasn’t. Volume 2 understands that celebration without acknowledgement is hollow. It insists on both — and in doing so, it quietly rewrites the map.

Enemy of the State (1998)
5Star, 9.00pm

What once played as a slick, slightly paranoid studio thriller now lands with the weight of a warning we ignored. Enemy of the State imagines a world where surveillance is total, frictionless, and largely invisible — a fantasy in 1998, a working description of modern life today. The film’s great trick is that it never treats this as science fiction. It assumes the machinery is already humming behind the walls, waiting for the right person to fall into its gears.

Will Smith’s everyman lawyer is less a protagonist than a case study: an ordinary life shredded the moment it brushes against a system built to observe first and justify later. The chase sequences still crackle, but it’s the quieter moments that feel most contemporary — the sense that privacy is not something you lose dramatically, but something that evaporates, one data point at a time.

Gene Hackman, playing a man who has already seen too much, gives the film its moral centre. His paranoia, once played for texture, now reads as pragmatism. He understands the truth the film keeps circling: the individual never really stood a chance. Not against institutions that can see everything, remember everything, and act without ever being seen themselves.

Rewatched now, Enemy of the State feels less like a relic of the pre‑digital age and more like a dispatch from the moment just before the curtain lifted — a reminder that the future didn’t arrive suddenly. It crept in, frame by frame, until the fiction became the baseline..

How the Beatles Changed the World
Sky Arts, 9.00pm

The story of The Beatles has been told so many times it risks feeling like national folklore — polished, repeated, softened at the edges. But this documentary reminds you that beneath the mythology sits a cultural rupture so vast it’s still sending out aftershocks. What’s striking isn’t the familiar anecdotes or the well‑worn footage; it’s the sheer velocity with which four young men from Liverpool altered the emotional and aesthetic temperature of an entire generation.

The film traces that shift with a kind of steady, accumulating force. You see how quickly the band outgrew the machinery built to contain them, how their experiments in sound, style and self‑presentation rippled outward into politics, youth identity, fashion, even the language of dissent. The details are interesting, of course — the studio innovations, the transatlantic feedback loop, the sudden expansion of what pop music was allowed to be — but it’s the reach that lingers. The sense that the world didn’t just listen to The Beatles; it reorganised itself around them.

What the documentary captures best is the scale of that transformation. Not the tidy narrative of genius, but the messier truth: that cultural change often arrives disguised as entertainment, and only later reveals itself as a shift in collective imagination. The Beatles didn’t simply write songs. They altered the weather.

🌟 Minority Report (2002)
ITV1, 10.20pm

A sleek vision of a future where intent is enough for punishment

This is the kind of future that looks polished on the surface — clean lines, efficient systems, everything humming with the confidence of a world that believes it has solved the problem of wrongdoing. But scratch at it and you find something colder: a justice machine that no longer waits for action, only for the hint of it. In this world, suspicion becomes evidence, and evidence becomes verdict, all before a single choice is made.

What’s striking is how reasonable it all appears at first glance. The system works. It prevents harm. It tidies away the chaos of human unpredictability. Yet the more you sit with it, the more that efficiency feels like a trap. A society that punishes intent is a society that has stopped believing people can change, hesitate, reconsider, or simply be flawed without being dangerous.

The film’s sheen — the glass, the chrome, the quiet inevitability of the process — only sharpens the discomfort. You’re left with a question that refuses to settle: even if such a system could function flawlessly, what kind of world would it create? And who would we become inside it?

It’s the moral unease that lingers, long after the plot mechanics fade.

Babylon (2022)
Channel 4, 11.00pm

Babylon opens in a frenzy — bodies, music, ambition all colliding in a Hollywood that’s expanding faster than anyone inside it can quite comprehend. Damien Chazelle isn’t subtle about the excess; he doesn’t want to be. He’s charting a moment when the industry was mutating at speed, swallowing people whole as it lurched from silent cinema to sound, from chaos to control, from possibility to hierarchy. The film’s scale mirrors the era’s volatility: everything is loud, oversized, teetering on the edge of collapse.

What gives it shape is the through‑line of transition. You watch characters sprint to keep up with a system that keeps reinventing itself, and the cost becomes painfully clear. Talent isn’t enough. Devotion isn’t enough. Even success isn’t enough. Hollywood builds its legends quickly, but it discards them even faster, and Babylon understands that the casualties aren’t accidents — they’re part of the machinery.

There are moments of beauty, flashes of genuine awe, but they sit alongside the wreckage. The film keeps returning to the same truth: not everything survives the shift. Some careers, some dreams, some people simply get left behind as the industry decides what it wants to be next.

It’s messy, ambitious, occasionally overwhelming — but that’s the point. Babylon isn’t a eulogy. It’s a reminder that every golden age has a shadow, and every reinvention comes with a body count.

Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle
Sky Arts, 11.15pm

A life lived in the margins of a phenomenon that hadn’t yet realised it was a phenomenon. Sutcliffe stands there — half in the frame, half already drifting toward another canvas — and the film treats that liminal space with a kind of quiet respect. He isn’t the Beatle who left; he’s the artist who was never meant to stay.

Hamburg becomes the crucible. Noise, neon, exhaustion, possibility. While the others sharpened their sound, Sutcliffe was sketching the world around them, catching the blur of youth before it hardened into legend. The documentary leans into that tension: the band accelerating toward global myth while he slows, turns, chooses a different kind of intensity.

There’s a melancholy to it, but not the sentimental kind. More the ache of paths diverging — friendships stretched by ambition, love pulling in a new direction, talent refusing to be confined to a bass guitar. His story is brief, bright, and strangely weightless, like a flare that burns out before anyone realises how much light it gave off.

History rarely captures these near‑misses in full. This one gets close.

Candyman (2021)
BBC One, 12.10am

A mirror held up to a neighbourhood that keeps being rewritten, repainted, renamed — yet never truly changed. This Candyman isn’t interested in jump‑scares for their own sake; it’s tracing the way trauma settles into a place, how a story becomes a warning, then a ritual, then a wound that refuses to close. Horror here is less a genre than a method of remembering.

The film treats the myth as a kind of communal archive. Every retelling adds a layer, every injustice another echo. You feel that weight in the way the camera lingers on walls, on doorways, on the spaces where people used to live before they were priced out or pushed out. The supernatural is almost the least frightening thing on screen. What really chills is the sense that the conditions that birthed the legend — violence, erasure, neglect — are still humming beneath the surface, waiting.

Sunday 26th April 2026

Jesse James (1939)
Great Action, 9.40am

A film that doesn’t just polish the legend — it manufactures it wholesale. This is Hollywood in full myth‑forging mode, taking a man whose life was knotted with brutality, opportunism and political ambiguity, and recasting him as a wronged folk hero with a clean conscience and a noble jawline. The studio system knew exactly what it was doing: sanding down the splinters until the outlaw fit neatly into a story America wanted to tell about itself.

What’s most revealing, watching it now, is how brazen the reframing is. Structural violence becomes personal grievance. Organised crime becomes frontier justice. The film lifts James out of the messy tangle of Reconstruction‑era politics and racial terror and drops him into a simpler moral universe where he can be admired without discomfort. It’s not just selective — it’s evasive, a deliberate refusal to engage with the uglier truths that made men like him possible.

And yet the sweep of the landscapes, the earnest performances, the sheer confidence of the production all work to lull you into accepting the legend as fact. That’s the danger. The film doesn’t merely retell history; it overwrites it, replacing complexity with a story that flatters national memory. Outlaw as myth, yes — but also myth as erasure, smoothing the past into something easier to believe and far harder to question.

The Man in the Iron Mask (1998)
Channel 5, 1.45pm

A film that treats identity as both performance and punishment. The twin conceit — one brother crowned, the other entombed — becomes a way of thinking about legitimacy itself: who gets to rule, who gets erased, and how power maintains its own reflection. It’s all delivered with that late‑90s sheen, half‑swashbuckling, half‑melodrama, but beneath the gloss sits a surprisingly sharp question about the stories monarchies tell to justify themselves.

What the film understands, even if it doesn’t always linger on it, is the allure of the double. The idea that behind every ruler there might be another version, hidden, suppressed, more humane or more dangerous. It’s a fantasy of substitution — the belief that changing the face might change the system. The narrative leans into that hope, even as the world it depicts remains rigid, hierarchical, and deeply invested in keeping certain truths locked away.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
E4, 9.00pm

A film built on the irresistible pull of performance — sometimes to its benefit, sometimes to its detriment. It moves with the confidence of a stadium anthem, broad, polished, engineered to lift the crowd. But that sweep comes at a cost. The rough edges of the real story are buffed down, rearranged, or simply ignored, leaving a portrait that feels truer to the mythology of Queen than to the complicated, contradictory life at its centre.

Rami Malek’s Freddie is the axis everything spins around. The film knows it, leans into it, and ultimately depends on it. His physicality, the flicker of vulnerability behind the bravado, the way he channels the loneliness that fame can’t quite drown — that’s where the film finds its pulse. Whenever the script falters, the music steps in, carrying the emotional weight the narrative sometimes sidesteps.

The Untouchables (1987)
BBC Two, 10.00pm

A film that loves its clean lines — the white hats, the black hats, the moral clarity carved in granite — even as the story it tells keeps slipping into the grey. De Palma shoots Prohibition Chicago like a fable, all sharp angles and operatic gestures, but beneath the style sits a far messier truth: the lawmen and the criminals aren’t separated by principle so much as by who gets to claim righteousness.

Eliot Ness is framed as the incorruptible crusader, yet the film quietly admits that his victories depend on methods that look suspiciously like the ones he condemns. Raids blur into ambushes. Justice becomes a negotiation between what’s legal and what’s necessary. The famous set‑pieces — the station steps, the border shootout — are thrilling, but they’re also reminders of how violence gets repackaged as heroism when the right side pulls the trigger.

Shaun of the Dead (2004)
ITV1, 10.15pm

comedy about a man who keeps promising himself he’ll change tomorrow — only for tomorrow to arrive with the undead shuffling down the street. The genius of it is how little the apocalypse actually alters the rhythms of Shaun’s life. The zombies are almost incidental at first, just another thing he fails to notice while drifting between the pub, the sofa and the same circular arguments with the people who love him.

Wright and Pegg play the horror straight enough to give it bite, but the real sting comes from the social satire. The film keeps nudging you toward the uncomfortable thought that the pre‑apocalypse world wasn’t all that different: people glazed over on their commutes, friendships stuck in arrested development, relationships running on autopilot. When the dead rise, it doesn’t disrupt the pattern — it exposes it.

And that’s the joke, and the sadness. The apocalypse doesn’t transform Shaun; it simply forces him to confront the inertia he’s been coasting on for years. Survival becomes less about fighting zombies and more about finally choosing to act, to grow, to stop sleepwalking through his own life. A comedy about inertia disguised as horror, and a reminder that sometimes the scariest thing is realising how long you’ve been standing still.

Who Really Killed Michael Jackson
Channel 5, 10.30pm

A documentary that arrives at an awkward cultural moment — just as Michael, the new biopic, is rolling out its own carefully managed version of the story. The contrast is striking. The film wants celebration, redemption, a smooth narrative arc. This documentary, by comparison, is jagged, unresolved, full of competing voices and unanswered questions. One is myth‑building; the other is myth‑unravelling.

Watching it now, with the marketing machine in full swing, you feel the tension between legacy and truth more sharply than ever. The documentary keeps circling the final years, the pressures, the medical decisions, the entourage dynamics — all the things the biopic will inevitably soften or sidestep. It’s not hunting a single villain so much as exposing a network of failures, dependencies and denials that accumulated around a man who had long since stopped being treated as a person.

And then there’s my strange, almost surreal recent Cineworld visit — staff in Michael Jackson–style hats, part of the promotional push. It’s a reminder of how easily the iconography survives while the context evaporates. How many of them, I wondered, actually knew the story behind the hat, the glove, the silhouette? How many understood the cost of the myth they were helping to sell?

That’s the uncomfortable truth the documentary brushes up against. Jackson’s legacy is now a marketplace, a battleground, a brand. The narrative remains contested because too many interests are invested in keeping it that way. The result is a portrait that refuses to settle — a life still argued over, still obscured, still unresolved.

Monday 27th April 2026

Maps of Power – USA
PBS America, 7.30pm

A study of a country that likes to imagine it shaped itself, yet keeps revealing how profoundly it was shaped by the land beneath it. The programme treats geography not as backdrop but as the quiet architect of American power — the rivers that made industry possible, the oceans that offered protection, the vast interior that encouraged expansion long before policy caught up with ambition.

What gives it its charge is the way it reframes inevitability. The United States didn’t simply choose to become a global power; it was positioned for it, nudged toward it by terrain, resources, and the sheer scale of the continent. Decisions mattered, of course, but they were made within boundaries set long before any president or strategist entered the scene. Geography as destiny — not in a fatalistic sense, but as the stage on which every political drama must play out.

There’s also a subtle critique running underneath: the idea that American exceptionalism often forgets the map. The programme keeps returning to the tension between myth and material reality, between the stories a nation tells about itself and the physical forces that quietly shape its trajectory. Power, it suggests, isn’t just ideology or military might — it’s position, access, vulnerability, advantage.

A reminder that the world’s most influential country is, in the end, still beholden to the ground it stands on.

Festival of Britain: A Brave New World
BBC Four, 9.00pm

A documentary about a moment when Britain tried to imagine itself forward — not through nostalgia, not through imperial hangover, but through design, science, colour and confidence. Watching it now, the ambition feels almost alien. A country emerging from rationing and rubble dared to sketch a future that was brighter, cleaner, more communal. The Festival wasn’t just an exhibition; it was a national act of self‑invention.

What the programme captures so well is the tension between that optimism and the distance we feel from it today. The South Bank pavilions, the Skylon, the Dome of Discovery — they weren’t just architectural statements, they were declarations of intent. Britain wanted to be modern. It wanted to be bold. It wanted to believe that planning and imagination could remake society. That energy hums through the archive footage, a kind of civic electricity.

And yet, from our vantage point, the vision feels both inspiring and faintly heartbreaking. So much of what the Festival promised — social renewal, technological confidence, a shared sense of direction — has been eroded by decades of political drift and cultural fragmentation. The documentary doesn’t labour the point, but the contrast is unavoidable. You’re left with the sense of a country that once knew how to dream in public, and now struggles to agree on what the dream should be.

Arabesque (1966)
Film4

A thriller that moves with the breezy confidence of a film more interested in the how than the why. The plot — ancient codes, shadowy villains, a professor dragged into intrigue — is really just scaffolding for the real attraction: motion. Bodies, cars, camera angles, all sliding and swivelling through a story that barely pauses long enough to explain itself.

Stanley Donen treats espionage like choreography. Scenes tilt, swirl, and glide, as if the film is trying to outrun its own thinness. And in a way, it works. The pleasure comes from the surfaces — the colours, the set‑pieces, the elegant absurdity of it all — rather than any deeper thematic weight. Meaning is optional; momentum is mandatory.

Holy Cow (2024)
Film4, 11.40pm

A film that moves at the pace of real life — unhurried, attentive, quietly absorbing. Holy Cow trusts the viewer enough to slow down, to sit with the world as it is rather than forcing it into dramatic shapes. That confidence in stillness becomes its signature.

At its centre is a simple, almost fragile plot: a rural community navigating the arrival, disappearance, and reappearance of a cow that seems to matter far more than its modest presence suggests. The animal becomes a kind of hinge — a way of revealing relationships, tensions, and small acts of care that might otherwise pass unnoticed. People search, argue, negotiate, wait. Nothing is overstated. Everything is observed.

The camera lingers on fields, on hands, on the quiet labour that structures everyday existence. Conversations drift. Silences stretch. Meaning accumulates slowly, like weather. The film isn’t interested in twists or revelations; it’s interested in how people inhabit their lives, how they respond to disruption, how they find equilibrium again.

What stays with you is the gentleness of the gaze. Holy Cow doesn’t push, prod, or editorialise. It watches. It listens. It trusts that the smallest gestures — a shared meal, a hesitant apology, a moment of recognition — can carry emotional weight if you give them room.

Quiet, observational, grounded.

Tuesday 28th April 2026

Maps of Power – Russia
PBS America, 7.30pm

A portrait of a country whose sheer physical scale is both its greatest asset and its deepest liability. The programme treats the Russian landmass not as a backdrop but as the central character — a vast, often unforgiving geography that has shaped every political instinct, every strategic reflex, every historical trauma.

What emerges is a sense of a state permanently negotiating with its own size. The endless plains that once enabled expansion also expose it to invasion. The long borders that project influence also demand constant defence. The distances that create strategic depth simultaneously fracture cohesion. Scale becomes strength and vulnerability in the same breath.

The documentary traces how this geography has produced a particular mindset: a fixation on buffers, on spheres of influence, on the need to secure space before others can exploit it. Policy follows terrain. So does paranoia. The map explains more than ideology ever could.

What the programme captures, quietly but clearly, is the tension between ambition and fragility. Russia’s power is real, but so are the pressures baked into its landscape — the cold, the distances, the borders that never quite feel settled. A reminder that geography doesn’t just shape nations; it shapes the stories they tell about themselves, and the fears they can never quite outrun.

Booksmart (2019)
BBC Three, 10.05pm

A film that announces itself as a sharp, fast teen comedy, then quietly reveals it’s doing something more generous and more perceptive. On the surface, it’s a one‑night‑only odyssey — two overachievers determined to cram four years of missed chaos into a single evening. But beneath the jokes and the velocity sits a story about friendship, self‑mythology, and the uncomfortable moment when you realise the world hasn’t been waiting for you to catch up.

What makes it sing is the precision. The dialogue snaps, the pacing never slackens, and the film keeps finding small, telling details about how teenagers perform confidence while quietly panicking underneath. It’s a comedy about ambition and insecurity, about the stories we tell ourselves to stay upright, and the shock of discovering that everyone else has been improvising too.

The emotional intelligence creeps up on you. The film understands that growing up isn’t a grand revelation but a series of tiny recalibrations — accepting that your best friend has a life beyond you, that your rivals aren’t villains, that your plans might not survive contact with reality. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also tender in a way that feels earned rather than engineered.

Fast, sharp, and far more perceptive than it first appears — a coming‑of‑age film that actually lets its characters come of age.

Half Man
BBC One, 10.40pm

Half Man is a drama about the slow, inward collapse of a man who can no longer keep his inner life and outer performance aligned. It’s not a story of sudden crisis but of accumulated pressure — the kind that erodes identity grain by grain. Niall moves through his days with a brittle, haunted precision, trying to maintain the version of himself that others expect while privately slipping out of his own skin.

Jamie Bell’s performance is the axis on which the whole series turns, and the Radio Times interview (18–24 April 2026) makes clear why it feels so lived‑in. “Niall’s in a tunnel of self‑loathing,” Bell says, and the show captures that tunnel with unnerving clarity — the narrowing of options, the shrinking of confidence, the sense of being trapped inside a self you no longer trust. Bell admits, “I found it easy to relate to him,” describing how Niall’s emotional exhaustion echoed periods of his own life. That recognition gives the performance its bruised, unguarded honesty.

He calls the role “troubled, but painfully human,” and that’s the tone the series sustains. Nothing is melodramatic. The drama lies in the small humiliations, the silences that stretch too long, the moments where Niall performs normality while quietly fraying at the edges. Bell notes that Half Man captures “the way men fold in on themselves rather than ask for help,” and the scripts lean into that truth — the cultural reflex to endure rather than articulate, to cope rather than confess.

Richard Gadd’s perspective, also in the Radio Times (18–24 April 2026), adds another layer. “I sacrifice my life for my projects,” he says, and Half Man bears the marks of that intensity. After the success of Baby Reindeer, Gadd describes weeks of panic — “I tried for weeks on end because my life’s work had vanished” — before finding the shape of this new series. He calls Half Man “even more intense,” a work that pushed him further than anything he has made before. The writing carries that sense of a creator forcing himself into uncomfortable emotional territory, treating the process as “a kind of self‑imposed ordeal” in pursuit of truth.

Together, Bell and Gadd create a drama that feels both intimate and unsettling. Half Man isn’t about spectacle; it’s about fracture — identity under pressure, masculinity under scrutiny, and the quiet, grinding courage it takes to acknowledge the parts of yourself you’ve spent years trying not to see.

A study in fracture, yes — but also a study in the cost of holding yourself together for too long.

Storyville – Dogs of War
BBC Four, 10.00pm

A Storyville documentary tracing the extraordinary, often disturbing life of Dave Tomkins — a seemingly ordinary Englishman who spent over 40 years fighting other people’s wars for money. Rather than a broad survey of mercenary culture, the film uses Tomkins’ rise and fall to illuminate the covert world of freelance conflict, illicit arms deals and state‑sanctioned deniability. His story becomes a window into the moral drift and psychological toll of a life lived in the shadows, where violence is both a profession and a trap.

The Woman in Black (2012)
BBC One, 11.35pm

ghost story that works because it refuses to rush, The Woman in Black leans into atmosphere with a confidence that feels almost old‑fashioned now. It’s a film built on creaking floorboards, swallowed light, and the slow tightening of dread — a reminder that fear doesn’t need volume, only patience.

Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor sent to a remote village to settle the affairs of a deceased widow. The locals recoil at his arrival, the house stands marooned in marshland, and the past hangs over everything like a damp fog. The plot is simple — a haunting tied to grief, guilt, and a wrong that refuses to stay buried — but the execution is meticulous. Every corridor seems too long, every silence too heavy, every shadow too eager to move.

What makes the film linger is its commitment to mood. The house itself feels alive, the landscape hostile, the villagers hollowed out by fear. Director James Watkins treats the story as a piece of gothic machinery: slow cranks, sudden shocks, and a sense that the supernatural is less a presence than an inevitability. Radcliffe’s performance — subdued, grieving, quietly frayed — grounds the film in human sorrow rather than spectacle.

A classic ghost tale told with restraint and precision. Not loud, not frantic — just steadily, inexorably unsettling. A reminder that sometimes the scariest thing is the shape you think you saw at the edge of the frame.

Stacey Dooley: Rape on Trial
BBC Three, 11.40pm

A difficult but necessary look at justice in practice. This documentary follows four women who waived their anonymity and allowed Stacey Dooley to track their cases across three years — a span stretched by Crown Court backlogs and the barrister strikes, which repeatedly pushed their trial dates further into the future. The delays become part of the story: not just procedural hurdles, but emotional burdens that shape every stage of the women’s lives.

Dooley’s approach is observational rather than intrusive. She sits with the women through the long waits, the uncertainty, the scrutiny, and the quiet exhaustion of a system that demands resilience long before anyone reaches a courtroom. The police work is shown in detail — careful, methodical, often painstaking — but the documentary makes clear how high the evidential threshold is, and how easily a case can falter even when complainants have done everything asked of them.

All four defendants in the cases followed by the programme were ultimately acquitted, a fact that underscores the documentary’s central tension: the gap between what victims experience and what the legal system can prove. Dooley herself has said that witnessing the process left her unsure whether she would report a rape if it happened to her — not because she doubts the police, but because she saw how gruelling and uncertain the journey can be.

What the film captures, without sensationalism, is the emotional cost of seeking justice in a system under strain. It shows the courage required simply to persist, and the toll of a process that can feel adversarial even when everyone involved is trying to do their job.

A sober, unflinching examination of how justice works — and how it feels — for those who step forward.

Wednesday 29th April 2026

🌟 Odd Man Out (1947)
Talking Pictures, 9.10pm

A city, a man, and a slow movement toward inevitability. Isolation rendered with precision — and with politics woven into every shadow.

Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is often described as a noir‑inflected man‑hunt thriller, but that undersells what the film is actually doing. Beneath the expressionist lighting and the snow‑choked streets lies a remarkably bold portrait of the Northern Irish conflict — bold precisely because it refuses propaganda, refuses clarity, and refuses to let anyone, on any side, off the hook.

At the centre is Johnny McQueen, played with wounded gravity by James Mason: a leader of an unnamed paramilitary group clearly modelled on the IRA. The film never says “IRA,” but the parallels are unmistakable — the clandestine meetings, the political robberies, the rhetoric of liberation, the sense of a movement both disciplined and fraying. Reed’s choice to fictionalise the organisation isn’t evasive; it’s strategic. It lets him explore the psychology and consequences of political violence without being trapped in the binaries of 1940s newsreels.

What the film is really saying about the IRA — and about the conflict more broadly — is that violence creates its own weather system. Once Johnny is wounded during the botched robbery, the political cause dissolves and the film becomes a study of what happens when ideology meets human frailty. The organisation tries to protect him, but fear and self‑interest seep in. Civilians debate whether to help him, but their motives are muddied by guilt, opportunism, or religious conviction. The police pursue him, but even they seem uneasy about the machinery they serve.

Reed’s Belfast is a moral maze. Every character Johnny encounters reflects a different facet of the conflict:

• the idealist who still believes in the cause,
• the pragmatist who wants out,
• the opportunist who sees profit in chaos,
• the religious moralist who sees sin everywhere,
• the ordinary people simply trying to survive the politics that engulf them.

The IRA‑like group is shown not as monsters but as men — frightened, committed, compromised, sometimes noble, sometimes reckless. Reed isn’t condemning them outright, but he is stripping away the romance. Johnny’s journey is a slow, painful unravelling of the heroic myth: the revolutionary leader reduced to a hunted, delirious figure stumbling through a city that no longer recognises him.

By the time the ending arrives — inevitable, tragic, almost ritualistic — the film has made its point with devastating clarity. Political violence may begin with ideals, but it ends in isolation. The cause may be collective, but the consequences are always personal. And in the cold streets of Reed’s Belfast, no one escapes untouched.

A masterpiece of atmosphere, yes — but also a quietly radical meditation on the cost of conflict, long before British cinema dared speak openly about the Troubles.

Maps of Power – China
PBS America, 7.30pm

A study of a civilisation‑state where power is inseparable from scale — not just the physical scale of territory, but the temporal scale of history. The programme treats China’s map as something layered: dynasties, borders, rivers, trade routes, fault lines, all sedimented into a political imagination that stretches far beyond the present moment. Geography here isn’t a constraint; it’s a long memory.

What emerges is a portrait of a country whose strategic instincts have been shaped over millennia. The great river systems — the Yellow, the Yangtze, the Pearl — created both abundance and vulnerability, binding populations together while exposing them to flood, famine and invasion. The northern plains, open and undefended, bred a deep fear of encirclement. The mountains and deserts to the west offered insulation but also isolation. And the coastline, once a source of anxiety, has become the engine of modern power.

The programme’s argument is clear: China’s rise isn’t sudden. It’s the reassertion of a pattern. Power defined by scale, shaped over time.

What gives the documentary its charge is the way it links geography to political behaviour. The desire for buffers, the emphasis on unity, the suspicion of fragmentation — these aren’t just ideological choices but responses to a landscape that has repeatedly punished weakness. The South China Sea becomes not just a maritime dispute but an attempt to secure a vulnerable flank. The Belt and Road Initiative reads as a modern extension of ancient trade arteries. Even internal governance — the preference for centralisation, the anxiety about regionalism — is framed as a lesson learned from centuries of fracturing and reunification.

Yet the programme also acknowledges the paradox at the heart of China’s map: the same vastness that enables power also generates strain. Managing diversity across such a huge territory requires constant negotiation. Maintaining cohesion demands both infrastructure and narrative. And the speed of modern development has created new vulnerabilities — environmental, demographic, economic — that geography alone cannot solve.

The result is a portrait of a state shaped by its land, its rivers, its borders, and its long historical arc. A reminder that China’s power is not just a product of the present moment, but of a map that has been teaching the same lessons for thousands of years.

Play for Today – Edna, the Inebriate Woman
BBC Four, 10.00pm

Uncompromising, unsentimental, and still difficult — Edna, the Inebriate Woman remains one of the most searing pieces ever produced under the Play for Today banner. First broadcast in 1971, it’s a drama that refuses to soften its gaze or tidy its politics. Instead, it follows Edna — played with astonishing, unvarnished force by Patricia Hayes — as she drifts through hostels, doorways, institutions and bureaucratic dead ends, each one promising help but offering only another form of containment.

What makes the film so enduringly powerful is its refusal to romanticise or pathologise Edna. She isn’t a symbol, a warning, or a case study. She’s a woman trying to survive in a system that treats her as an inconvenience. The script, by Jeremy Sandford, exposes the gaps between policy and reality: the well‑meaning social workers who can’t change anything, the punitive shelters that confuse discipline with care, the revolving‑door institutions that mistake paperwork for compassion. Every encounter reveals another layer of structural failure.

The drama’s style is as stark as its subject. Shot with documentary immediacy, it blurs the line between fiction and reportage, making the viewer feel uncomfortably close to Edna’s world — the cold, the hunger, the humiliation, the small moments of defiance. There’s no sentimentality, no redemptive arc, no comforting resolution. The film’s honesty is its challenge: it shows a society that has decided who is worth saving and who is simply too difficult to accommodate.

More than fifty years on, the play’s anger hasn’t dimmed. If anything, its critique feels sharper. Homelessness, institutional churn, the criminalisation of poverty — the issues that defined Edna’s life remain stubbornly present. That’s why the drama still hits with such force: it isn’t a period piece, it’s a mirror.

A landmark of British social realism, and a reminder that the most radical thing a drama can do is look directly at the people society tries hardest not to see.

Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough
Sky Arts, 12.00am

A portrait of Irvine Welsh that treats reality not as a boundary but as a launchpad. Rather than a straight literary profile, this 2025 documentary follows Welsh through the many strands of his creative life — the writing, the DJing, the drug experiences, the friendships, the cultural detours — and shows how each one feeds the others. The title isn’t a provocation; it’s a working method.

The film makes clear that Welsh has never been a realist in the narrow sense. His fiction begins in lived experience — the class politics, the addiction, the Edinburgh street‑level detail — but it rarely stays there. The documentary shows how he bends that material, pushes it, distorts it, letting it mutate into satire, hallucination, grotesque comedy or moral fable. Reality is the raw material; the work happens in the stretch.

What’s new here is the access. We see Welsh in the studio, behind the decks, on the road, and — most strikingly — undergoing a guided DMT session that becomes a kind of creative excavation. The film treats this not as spectacle but as insight: a writer probing the edges of consciousness to see what might be found there. It’s part biography, part creative anatomy.

There’s also a strong thread about reinvention. Welsh talks about the need to keep moving — between forms, between cities, between states of mind — and the documentary follows that restlessness with a loose, kinetic energy. Actors read from his novels, collaborators reflect on his influence, and Welsh himself speaks with the amused impatience of someone who has no interest in being pinned down as a single thing.

What the film captures, ultimately, is a writer for whom the real world is necessary but insufficient. The grit matters, the politics matter, the lived experience matters — but the truth often lies in the exaggeration, the distortion, the surreal twist. A lively, revealing portrait of an artist who has spent his career proving that reality, on its own, simply isn’t enough.

Thursday 30th April 2026

Quadrophenia (1979)
Film4, 9.00pm

A film that still feels electric — not because of nostalgia, but because it understands youth as a kind of beautiful, combustible confusion. Quadrophenia isn’t just a Mod time capsule; it’s a portrait of a young man trying to assemble an identity from music, clothes, tribe and attitude, only to discover that none of it can save him from himself.

Phil Daniels’ Jimmy is the beating heart of it all: restless, angry, euphoric, insecure. He charges through London and Brighton as if motion alone might hold him together. The film captures that adolescent volatility with startling precision — the way certainty can flip into despair, the way belonging can evaporate in a single moment, the way a subculture can feel like salvation until it suddenly doesn’t.

What lingers is the tension between the myth and the reality. The Mods and Rockers clashes are iconic, but the film refuses to romanticise them. The violence is messy, the camaraderie fragile, the rebellion half‑formed. Even the idols — Sting’s cool, immaculate Ace Face — turn out to be illusions. The film’s great, devastating insight is that the identities we build in youth are often scaffolding, not foundations.

Visually, it’s raw and alive: scooters buzzing like wasps, crowds surging through narrow streets, Brighton rendered as both battleground and playground. The soundtrack — The Who at their most operatic — gives the film its pulse, but the emotion comes from the cracks in Jimmy’s bravado, the moments when the noise drops and the loneliness shows.

A landmark of British youth cinema: loud, bruised, swaggering, and painfully honest about the cost of trying to become someone when you’re not sure who that is.

Flic Story (1975)
Talking Pictures, 9.20pm

A manhunt stripped of glamour. Flic Story pairs Alain Delon’s cool precision with Jean‑Louis Trintignant’s quiet, unnerving intensity in a true‑crime drama that treats pursuit as a psychological duel rather than a spectacle. Based on the real investigation into gangster Emile Buisson, the film follows detective Roger Borniche as he tracks a fugitive who seems always one step ahead.

What gives it its grip is the tone: lean, procedural, unsentimental. No operatic shootouts, no romanticised cops‑and‑robbers mythology — just two men circling each other across post‑war France, each defined by discipline, patience, and a refusal to blink first. Delon plays Borniche as a professional who understands that control is his only weapon; Trintignant’s Buisson is the opposite, a man running on instinct and volatility.

when you’re not sure who that is.

🌟 This Is England (2006)
Film4, 11.25pm

A devastating portrait of vulnerability and influence — clear‑eyed, unflinching, and still one of the most honest examinations of how a young person can be shaped, claimed, and endangered by the forces around them.

Shane Meadows sets the film in 1983, a moment when Britain was bruised by recession, deindustrialisation, the Falklands aftershock, and a political climate that left many working‑class communities feeling abandoned. Into that landscape steps Shaun: grieving, lonely, and desperate for belonging. The early scenes capture the warmth of the original skinhead culture — multiracial, working‑class, built on music, humour and solidarity. Meadows is careful to show that this world begins as a refuge.

But the film’s emotional and political pivot arrives with Combo. His return brings with it the National Front, whose presence in the early 1980s was real, organised, and increasingly visible in some towns. Meadows doesn’t sensationalise this; he shows why the NF could feel attractive to certain young men at that moment. Not because of ideology in the abstract, but because it offered:

• a sense of purpose in a period of economic hopelessness
• a simplified explanation for complex social problems
• a feeling of being seen and valued by someone charismatic
• a ready‑made identity when others felt out of reach

The film’s insight is that the NF’s pull wasn’t intellectual — it was emotional. Combo doesn’t recruit Shaun with policy; he recruits him with attention, affection, and the promise of belonging. Meadows shows how ideology can slip into the gaps left by grief, insecurity, and social neglect.

Factually, this is grounded in the period. The National Front had been active since the 1970s and, although declining by 1983, still had a presence in youth culture, particularly through splinter groups and street‑level activism. Meadows draws directly on that history, showing how far‑right politics fed on economic despair and fractured communities. Although it is unclear if he accepts that they also grew out of them.

What makes This Is England so powerful is its refusal to flatten anyone into symbols. Combo’s racism is inseparable from his wounds; Shaun’s vulnerability is inseparable from his longing; the group’s fracture is inseparable from the country’s. The film becomes a study of how ideology preys on the emotionally exposed — and how a single summer can tilt a life off its axis.

Grounded, intimate, and painfully relevant, it remains one of British cinema’s clearest-eyed portraits of how extremism finds its foothold — not in strength, but in need.

The Myth of Marilyn Monroe
12.20am

The gap between person and myth continues to widen — and this documentary examines exactly how that happened. Rather than attempting to “recover” the real Norma Jeane, it looks at how Marilyn Monroe became the defining icon of 1950s America: a symbol shaped by Hollywood’s star‑making machinery, the mythology of the American Dream, and a culture hungry for stories about beauty, innocence and tragedy.

The film traces her rise through the studio system, showing how her image was crafted, polished and relentlessly projected until it became larger than the woman herself. It also charts how that image began to fracture even before her death. The pressures of fame, the contradictions of her public persona, and the strain of being both desired and dismissed created a tension that the documentary treats as central to her story.

What the programme makes clear is that Monroe’s afterlife has only deepened the myth. Everyone now carries their own version of her — the comic genius, the victim of the system, the feminist icon, the tragic muse. Each interpretation reflects the era that produced it, which is why the real woman remains so elusive. The documentary doesn’t pretend to resolve that; instead, it shows how the myth has become a cultural mirror.

A study of fame as distortion, and of a life consumed by the legend built in its name — still expanding, still shifting, still obscuring the person who once stood at its centre.

Friday 1st May 2026

Spartacus (1960)
Film4, 6.15pm

Resistance at scale. Power challenged collectively. But what makes Spartacus endure isn’t just its spectacle — it’s the way it frames rebellion as something born from shared humiliation, shared labour, and shared refusal. The film understands that oppression is structural, and so liberation must be, too.

Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus begins as a single man pushed past endurance, but the film quickly widens its lens. The uprising isn’t a lone hero’s crusade; it’s a mass awakening among people who have been told their lives are disposable. The power of the story lies in that shift — from individual suffering to collective action, from private rage to public defiance. The famous “I’m Spartacus” scene still resonates because it captures the moment when identity becomes communal, when solidarity becomes stronger than fear.

Set against the backdrop of the late Roman Republic, the film also carries the fingerprints of its own time. Made in 1960, at the height of McCarthyism’s aftermath, it was a deliberate act of resistance behind the camera as well: Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted for refusing to name names, was credited openly for the first time in a decade. The film’s politics — about tyranny, conformity, and the cost of speaking out — are inseparable from that context. Spartacus’s rebellion becomes a metaphor for artistic and political courage in an era of enforced silence.

Visually, the film is monumental: armies massing on hillsides, gladiators training under brutal discipline, the Roman elite scheming in marble chambers. But the emotional core is intimate — the friendships forged in captivity, the fragile hope of freedom, the knowledge that the system they’re fighting is vast and merciless. Kubrick’s direction gives the story both sweep and sorrow: the rebellion feels glorious, but its end feels inevitable.

A classic not because of its scale, but because of its clarity: power can be challenged, but only when people stand together. A story of resistance that still speaks to the present, precisely because it understands how collective defiance begins — quietly, painfully, and then all at once.

Trainspotting (1996)
Film4, 10.00pm

Raw, stylised, and unapologetic — a defining voice, and tonight it lands with an extra charge after the earlier Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough. If that documentary showed Welsh pushing beyond realism through music, drugs, and altered states, Trainspotting is the cinematic proof: a film that takes lived experience and bends it until it becomes something sharper, funnier, crueller, and more truthful than straight realism could ever manage.

What Trainspotting captures is the rhythm of Welsh’s world — the speed, the wit, the nihilism, the sudden tenderness. Danny Boyle translates that onto screen with a kinetic swagger: the camera lunging, spinning, diving into toilets, floating off ceilings. It’s not style for its own sake; it’s the visual language of characters who are constantly trying to escape themselves, whether through heroin, friendship, or sheer momentum.

Seen in the context of the documentary, the film becomes even clearer as part of Welsh’s creative project. The surreal flourishes — the dead baby crawling on the ceiling, the carpet swallowing Renton whole — aren’t departures from reality but expressions of it. They’re the same instinct you see in Welsh’s DMT session: push the world until it reveals what it’s hiding. The grotesque becomes a form of honesty.

What keeps the film from collapsing under its own energy is its emotional precision. Renton’s voiceover — funny, bitter, self‑lacerating — cuts through the bravado. The friendships feel real because they’re messy, loyal, destructive. The politics are there too, quietly: a generation left behind, a city in transition, a culture trying to outrun its own decline.

A landmark of British cinema and the purest expression of Welsh’s voice on screen — jagged, humane, furious, and alive. A perfect companion to the earlier portrait of the writer who imagined it all,

Dusty Springfield Night
BBC Four, from 10.00pm

A voice that defined a moment — and outlasted it. BBC Four’s Dusty Springfield Night honours not just the sound, but the woman behind it: a performer whose glamour, precision and emotional intelligence reshaped British pop, and whose private life carried a complexity the era was never ready to hold.

One of the most important truths the night’s programmes quietly acknowledge is Dusty’s sexuality. Though she never used modern labels, she spoke openly in interviews about loving both men and women — a remarkable act of candour in the 1970s, when such honesty could end careers. The documentaries treat this not as scandal but as context: part of the tension between the immaculate public image and the private self she fought to protect. It deepens the sense of a woman negotiating fame, desire, and identity in an industry that demanded perfection while offering little safety.

What emerges across the evening is the duality that made her extraordinary. Dusty’s voice carried both polish and ache — the studio perfectionist and the vulnerable soul beneath the surface. The archive performances and interviews show the craft, the discipline, the obsession with getting it right; they also show the cost of being a woman expected to embody glamour while navigating pressures she could never fully name.

Set against the wider sweep of British pop, Dusty becomes a hinge point: the bridge between girl‑group innocence and soul‑driven sophistication, between the optimism of the early ’60s and the more complicated decades that followed. Her influence is everywhere — in phrasing, in attitude, in the idea that pop can be both polished and bruised.

A night that honours not just the hits, but the depth behind them.

The World’s End (2013)
ITV1, 10.45pm

Nostalgia meets reality — and falters. Edgar Wright’s final entry in the Cornetto Trilogy takes the shape of a reunion comedy, but underneath the pints and punchlines is something far sadder: a man trying to drag the past into the present long after everyone else has moved on. Gary King’s “Golden Mile” isn’t a pub crawl; it’s a last, desperate attempt to resurrect a version of himself that only ever existed in his own memory.

The film’s brilliance lies in how it lets that nostalgia curdle. The early scenes play like a parody of middle‑aged regression — the old gang reluctantly humouring the one friend who never grew up — but as the night unravels, the metaphor becomes literal. The town has been replaced by glossy replicas, its people smoothed into conformity, its history overwritten. The sci‑fi twist isn’t a genre detour; it’s the punchline to the film’s argument. You can’t go home again, because home has changed — and so have you.

What makes it sting is the way Wright and Pegg refuse to let Gary off the hook. His nostalgia isn’t harmless; it’s destructive, a refusal to face adulthood, addiction, or the damage he’s done. The apocalypse becomes a kind of intervention, forcing him to confront the truth he’s been drinking to avoid. The others, meanwhile, embody the opposite trajectory: men who have grown up, compromised, settled, and now find themselves dragged back into a version of youth they no longer recognise.

Visually and rhythmically, it’s classic Wright — whip‑smart edits, choreographed chaos, jokes that detonate three scenes later. But the emotional core is heavier than in Shaun or Hot Fuzz. Beneath the genre play is a story about the danger of clinging to a past that can’t sustain you, and the cost of refusing to grow when everyone else has had to.

A comedy about the end of the world that’s really about the end of adolescence.

Get Carter (1971)
BBC Two, 11.00pm

Cold, precise, and unsentimental. No illusions here. Get Carter remains the purest expression of British noir — a world where violence is transactional, loyalty is brittle, and morality has been scraped down to the bone. Michael Caine’s Jack Carter moves through it like a blade: sharp, controlled, and utterly without sentiment. He isn’t an avenger in the Hollywood sense; he’s a man following a line of cause and effect to its brutal end.

What makes the film so stark is its refusal to romanticise anything — not the criminal underworld, not Carter’s competence, not the landscape he moves through. Newcastle and Gateshead are shown in their industrial rawness: slag heaps, half‑demolished terraces, concrete estates, the Tyne Bridge looming like a threat. The setting isn’t background; it’s the system Carter is fighting, a world built to grind people down and hide the damage.

The story is simple — a man returns home to investigate his brother’s death — but the execution is forensic. Mike Hodges strips away exposition, leaving gestures, glances, and sudden violence to do the work. Carter’s investigation becomes a tour through corruption, exploitation, and the casual cruelty of men who assume they’ll never be held to account. The film’s power lies in how little it explains and how much it reveals.

Caine’s performance is all control: the stillness, the clipped speech, the sense that every decision is already weighed and judged. There’s no redemption here, no catharsis, no comforting arc. Just a man who understands exactly what world he lives in — and what it will cost him to move through it.

A landmark of British crime cinema: cold, precise, unsentimental, and honest about the fact that in some places, justice isn’t delivered — it’s taken.

And on the radio

The Madness of George III
Saturday, 3.00pm

Power undone from within. This production takes one of Britain’s most mythologised monarchs and strips away the grandeur to reveal the fragility beneath. What begins as courtly ritual and political manoeuvring slowly collapses into something rawer: a portrait of authority eroded not by rebellion or intrigue, but by the mind’s own betrayal.

The drama understands that the real terror for a king is not losing power, but losing coherence. George’s decline is shown with a clarity that avoids both sentimentality and cruelty. The rituals of monarchy — the bows, the titles, the carefully choreographed deference — become increasingly hollow as his behaviour grows erratic, and the court’s response shifts from concern to calculation. Power, in this world, is conditional; once the king falters, everyone else begins to reposition.

Set against the political tensions of the late 18th century, the story becomes a study of how institutions react when the figure at their centre becomes unstable. Ministers circle, rivals advance, and the monarchy’s symbolic solidity fractures. The play’s sharpest insight is that madness doesn’t just unravel the individual — it exposes the system built around him.

What lingers is the tension between the man and the role. George is by turns sympathetic, infuriating, lucid, and lost, and the production refuses to flatten him into a tragic emblem. Instead, it shows the human cost of a position that allows no weakness, and the cruelty of a world that treats illness as failure.

A powerful, unsentimental look at authority in crisis — and at how quickly the foundations of power can crumble when the threat comes from within.

The Reunion
Sunday, 10.00am

Memory revisited, reshaped by time. This drama leans into the unsettling truth that the past is never fixed — it shifts as we return to it, coloured by what we’ve learned, what we’ve lost, and what we’ve tried to forget. A school friendship, once bright and uncomplicated, becomes the hinge on which everything turns when the characters are pulled back into the orbit of events they thought they’d left behind.

What the story captures so well is the instability of memory itself. The characters don’t just remember differently — they need to remember differently. Each version of the past protects something: pride, guilt, innocence, survival. As the narrative moves between then and now, the gaps widen, the contradictions sharpen, and the truth becomes something that has to be excavated rather than recalled.

Set against the sun‑bleached ease of youth and the cooler, more brittle present, the series becomes a study of how time reframes everything. What once felt like a small moment becomes a fault line; what once felt certain becomes suspect. The tension lies not in what happened, but in what each character can bear to admit.

A quiet, gripping reminder that the past doesn’t stay where you left it — it waits, it shifts, and when it returns, it asks its own questions.

And finally, streaming choices

Netflix – Straight to Hell
Available Monday

Crime, control, and the illusion of power. Straight to Hell takes the familiar architecture of a crime thriller and twists it into something sharper — a story about people who think they’re running the game, only to discover the game has already been rigged above their heads. It sits comfortably alongside the themes you’ve been circling this week: power exercised, power resisted, and the quiet panic that sets in when the old rules stop working.

The series follows a crew who believe they’re operating with precision and autonomy, only to find that every move they make is being shaped, watched, or anticipated by forces they barely understand. The tension comes not from the violence — though there’s plenty — but from the dawning realisation that their sense of control is a performance. The more they try to assert dominance, the more the cracks show.

What gives the show its edge is the way it treats crime as a system rather than a series of set‑pieces. Territory, loyalty, hierarchy — all of it feels brittle, provisional, constantly shifting. Characters cling to rituals of toughness and authority because the alternative is admitting how little power they actually hold. The illusion is the point: everyone is pretending, and everyone knows it.

Visually, it’s slick but not glossy — neon reflections, shadowed corners, the sense of a world that’s always slightly off‑balance. The performances lean into that instability, giving the story a nervous energy that keeps the ground moving under your feet.

A crime drama that understands the real threat isn’t the gun in the room — it’s the moment you realise you’re not the one holding it.

ITVX – The Book of Boba Fett Available now

Myth expanded, at the cost of mystery. The Book of Boba Fett takes one of Star Wars’ most enigmatic figures and does the thing modern franchises can’t resist: it fills in the gaps. The result is ambitious, often entertaining, and visually rich — but it inevitably trades the cool, silent power of the original character for something more literal, more explained, more earthbound.

The series reframes Boba not as the galaxy’s most feared bounty hunter but as a man trying to build order out of chaos, to rule rather than stalk, to negotiate rather than intimidate. It’s an intriguing shift, and the show commits to it: the desert rituals, the flashbacks, the slow construction of a new identity. But with every revelation, the aura dims a little. The helmet comes off, the motives are clarified, the myth becomes a biography.

There’s pleasure in the world‑building — the Tatooine politics, the crime‑syndicate manoeuvring, the sense of a frontier town trying to civilise itself. And when the series leans into its Western DNA, it finds a rhythm that suits Boba’s slower, more deliberate presence. Yet the show is at its most alive when it steps sideways into the wider Star Wars universe, which is both its strength and its tell: the myth of Boba Fett is no longer self‑contained.

A series that broadens the legend but inevitably softens it. The mystery that once defined Boba is replaced by character study, backstory, and connective tissue — a trade‑off that will satisfy some and frustrate others. But as a piece of modern Star Wars storytelling, it’s a clear statement of intent: nothing stays in the shadows anymore.

Netflix – Small Things Like These Available Monday

Quiet, winter‑bound, and devastating in its restraint. Small Things Like These adapts Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella into a film about conscience awakening in the smallest, coldest moments — the kind that change nothing and everything at once.

Set in 1985 Ireland, the story follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father of five. On his early‑morning deliveries he discovers a teenage girl locked in an outbuilding on the grounds of the local convent. That encounter becomes the film’s pivot: a glimpse into a Magdalene laundry still operating in plain sight, where young women are confined and forced into unpaid labour under the authority of the Church.

The plot unfolds with the same quiet force as the book. Bill’s discovery stirs memories of his own childhood — raised by a single mother who narrowly avoided the laundries herself — and he begins to see the town differently. The silence of neighbours, the evasions of priests, the polite insistence that nothing is wrong: all of it becomes part of the machinery that keeps the system running. The tension isn’t whether Bill can “save” anyone, but whether he can live with what he now knows.

Cillian Murphy plays Bill with a kind of inward tremor — a man who has spent years keeping his head down, now forced to confront the cost of that habit. The film refuses melodrama. No speeches, no grand gestures, just a slow tightening of moral pressure until a choice has to be made.

A small film in scale, but not in impact. A story about courage that doesn’t look like courage — and about the quiet, necessary act of refusing to look away.

Leaving soon

Conclave — Prime Video — Leaving Tuesday

A taut Vatican thriller where power shifts in whispers and shadows. Cardinals manoeuvre, alliances harden, and the question of who will lead the Church becomes a study in ambition, secrecy, and faith under pressure.

Interview with the Vampire — Netflix — Leaving Wednesday

Lush, fevered, and emotionally charged. A gothic confession stretched across centuries, where desire, guilt, and immortality blur into something both seductive and suffocating. A modern retelling that deepens the original’s ache.