The Deep Blue Sea, the latest from justly esteemed British director Terence Davies, shares its name with a Renny Harlin movie about genetically modified sharks (well, give or take a definite article). Both films deal in high anxiety and the looming spectre of death and both indulge in their own particular brand of theatrics. And - this may surprise you – as cinema, the shark movie works better.

Can Thomas Heywood's prosy Jacobean drama of country folk hunting, card playing, screwing around, sliding aristocratically into debt and harrowing one another to death translate successfully to the aftermath of the First World War? Only, perhaps, as edgy semi-farce, towards which Katie Mitchell's nervy, twilit production sometimes veers, not often intentionally. Acting to make you half believe in impossible characters might have saved it. But here you spend less time focusing on the poor puppets who flap around Mitchell's claustrophobic world than looking at the handsome, haunting set.

For a couple of years now British theatre has been harvesting a new crop of young female talent. Market leaders such as Lucy Prebble (Enron) and Polly Stenham (That Face) have made a splash in the West End, and where they led many others have followed.

James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce is best remembered for Michael Curtiz's entertainingly lurid 1945 movie version, starring Joan Crawford. Featuring William Faulkner among its screenwriters, it played fast and loose with Cain's book, but bashed it into crowd-pleasing shape successfully enough to win Crawford an Oscar.

Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected.

This is a play that begins after the end of an affair, and threads its precise, forensic way back to the very beginning of it. As the lovers are awkwardly reunited after two years, the theme of deceit as a web of competing and ambiguous claims is firmly established. Jerry, a literary agent, has learned that Emma, the wife of his oldest and dearest friend, with whom he had an affair for seven years, may now be having an adulterous relationship with one of his writers.

"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature,” preaches the Gospel according to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What the playwright omits to mention, however, is that it is possible to be ill-natured without in fact being terribly witty, a flaw that proves almost fatal for Warner’s acerbic, alienated new production of The School for Scandal. Overstyling Sheridan’s most stylised of comedies, Warner turns what Hazlitt described as the most “finished and faultless” play into a mass of tensions, exaggerations and contradictions. The result can be exhilarating in the moment, but wears off into confusion and a slight headache.

The protagonist in a coming-of-age movie is usually an adolescent, but in Cedar Rapids it's a fully-grown adult. The hapless ingénu in question is goofy and naive Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), dedicated 34-year-old salesman for the Brown Star Insurance company of Brown Valley, Wisconsin. In Lippe (pronounced Lippy) world, insurance isn't another name for dirty sales tricks and finding ingenious ways to weasel out of paying claims, but more like a kind of social service. Indeed, Brown Star's boss, Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root), prides himself on the firm's Christian values.

It's unlikely that this soap-esque miniseries about America's most notorious political clan will stir up the kind of furore in Britain that has engulfed it in the States. Over there, merely to mention the Kennedys seems to conjure up visions of a lost Eden (well, Camelot) in which America stood square-jawed against the Russians, won the race to the moon and policed the planet with its colossal Arsenal of Democracy. Add in the horrific assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby and the obliteration of all that glamour and promise, and it's a great shining myth that even Hollywood has never adequately captured.

It hasn't captured it here either, but the early signs are that The Kennedys is a hugely watchable political Dallasty, even if you could spend a lively evening at the absinthe, quibbling over casting or what's been left out. Certainly it doesn't look like the right-wing hatchet job it's been accused of being, and it's hard to understand how it has managed to polarise American reviewers like a boxing match between Obama and Sarah Palin ("a ham-fisted mess" according to The Hollywood Reporter, but "one of the most riveting, accurate historical dramas ever on TV" in the opinion of the New York Post).

Plenty of brickbats have been aimed at Katie Holmes for her portrayal of Jackie Kennedy, whom she manages to resemble fairly closely. But I thought she made a decent stab at portraying the former Jacqueline Bouvier's naive infatuation with the young Senator John Kennedy (usually known as Jack), angrily dismissing her mother's warnings that he'd merely treat her as a plaything and then throw her aside. As it turned out, mother knew best. We saw Jackie first dutifully playing the decorative political wife for the cameras, then watched it all turn sour as she threatened to divorce her philandering husband. True to form, Jack's bullying father Joe tried to bribe her out of doing anything so rash, or, more to the point, so politically damaging (the Kennedys celebrate JFK's election, pictured below).

It was Tom Wilkinson's performance as the overbearing patriarch Joe that glued the piece together. The fact that he hasn't been publicly dissected as exhaustively as his offspring gave the writers more of a clean slate, and Wilkinson was unpleasantly convincing in depicting Joe's brutal determination to realise his political ambitions through his sons. His casual adultery in front of his devoutly Catholic wife Rose spoke eloquently of the void between outward appearances and the character within.

While Joe's hardball vote-buying tactics and ruthless grasping for power may feel shockingly crude in our current era of smooth political triangulation, I reckon the programme doesn't tell half of what he really got up to. For instance, it doesn't claim that he made his fortune by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, like a real-life version of Boardwalk Empire's Nucky Thompson, but you'll find plenty of people who believe he did (Greg Kinnear acts presidential, pictured below).

But it does accurately depict old Joe's behaviour when he was President Roosevelt's Ambassador to Britain in the late 1930s, when he endorsed Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and urged America not to join in the war to save Europe. Roosevelt sacked him and recalled him to the States.

We saw the thwarted Kennedy père focus on his next project, which was to install his son Joe Junior in the White House. Depicted here as confident, ambitious and a chip off the paternal block, Joe Jr was killed while piloting a bomber over France in 1944. JFK was the next cab on the rank, and though admitting that all he really wanted to do was "teach history and chase girls", he rose successfully up the political ladder with plenty of help from dad's money and shady connections (Jackie, Jack and daughter Caroline, pictured below).

Greg Kinnear's Jack conveyed charm, intelligence and a kind of louche indifference to anyone else's feelings - a self-absorbed playboy surfing a giant wave of Kennedy money and influence. More sympathetic was Barry Pepper's Bobby Kennedy, bravely overcoming a weird set of prosthetic teeth which weren't much of an improvement on the busted, blackened fangs he wore in the recent True Grit movie. Seemingly a devoted family man who worked hard on the family's political project while harbouring no ambitions beyond getting back to practising law, maybe Bobby was the Kennedy who should have gone all the way to the big chair in the Oval Office.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Kennedys