With his debut film, Moon, Duncan Jones demonstrated that a sci-fi movie doesn't have to depend for its success on fleets of warring spacecraft or flesh-eating alien monstrosities. He's done it again with Source Code, a cool and clever thriller in which futuristic anxiety and mind-bending scientific theory are firmly anchored in almost mundane reality.
This debut feature by writer/director Thomas Ikimi was shot in 22 days on an infinitesimal budget, and while it's easy to point out some obvious flaws, it's far more constructive to look at what Ikimi has achieved. Chiefly, he wrote a script intriguing enough to lure Idris Elba on board, and he not only agreed to play the central role of Malcolm Gray, but additionally gave the project a hefty professional shove.
They've remade everything else, so what took them so long to get around to Hawaii Five-0? Maybe the exotic Hawaiian locations of JJ Abrams's Lost helped to trigger flashbacks of Steve McGarrett & co, which would explain why Abrams's henchmen Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci are co-producers of the new Five-0. And why Daniel Dae Kim, who played Jin in Lost, reappears here as Chin Ho Kelly.
Towards the end of Of Gods and Men, nine monks sit around a table and, following the protocol of a well-known biblical meal, partake of bread and wine (and, these being French monks, cheese). As they eat and drink they listen on a cassette to the ardent swirls of Swan Lake while the camera fixes on craggy faces caught in blissful, intensely moving transports of faith. It may not sound like much of a cinematic climax. But at least as much as any film arising from the so-called war on terror, Of Gods and Men demands to be seen.
The sense of crisis gathering over Spook Central in the last few episodes finally burst through this season finale like a Krakatoa-style cataclysm. Any lingering hopes that Richard Armitage’s Lucas North – the man we now know was really John Bateman – wasn’t really a black-hearted killer were brutally dashed. There was no more wriggle room. Bateman was bad to the bone.
The full-length version of Olivier Assayas's saga of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Venezuelan super-terrorist Carlos, was originally a three-part series for French TV and runs to five-and-a-half hours. Even the "short" cinema cut runs to two-and-a-half hours. Yet the director still felt it necessary to preface his opus with the warning that since many of Carlos's activities remained "grey areas" shrouded in mystery and ambiguity, it would be best to regard the film as fiction.
London River is a film about not knowing. It is released five years to the week after four bombs went off in London and killed all those innocent commuters. Among the victims of terrorist jihad are not only the dead themselves but the relatives who wait for confirmation that the fruit of their loins, of their womb, might have survived. It is a far cry from Four Lions.
Chris Ryan and Andy McNab are the Pepsi and Coca Cola of gung-ho, modern SAS war fiction, a lucrative genre that these one-man brands have carved up so effectively between them that it would take a gate-crasher of Nick Clegg-like proportions to threaten their duopoly.
Both men retain their pseudonymous existence, more for the self-publicising drama of it than for security reasons - although Ryan rather ludicrously asserts that his life would be at risk if his real identity was revealed. Literary critics aren’t that savage, surely.
It’s an accepted truth that Chris Morris is a comedy genius. Now the word "genius" is so overused in some quarters as to be rendered meaningless, but in Morris’s case it's a richly deserved description; he created or co-created some of the funniest, cleverest and most original comedy on British television, including The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam. Not a bad CV, even if it also contains the rather less amusing Nathan Barley.
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.