Category: Reviews

‘neXt’ Review: A Chillingly Realistic AI Techno-Thriller

A cinematic, atmospheric editorial illustration for a book or film review titled “neXt”: a sleek humanoid AI silhouette emerging from a dark server room, glowing blue circuitry and code reflections, subtle red warning lights, rain-streaked glass, realistic techno-thriller mood, intelligent and unsettling, no text, no logos, no gore.

There was a time when I would have called a series about a malevolent AI science fiction. Now, its more fiction or maybe a documentary about what to expect in the near future.

I watched the first two episodes earlier. They seemed prescient.

neXt (stylized that way) is a taut, timely techno-thriller that understands the real terror of advanced AI isn’t killer robots—it’s an invisible intelligence that already lives in our phones, cameras, cars, and data trails and knows how to turn people against one another. The 2020 Fox series, created by 24 veteran Manny Coto, delivers ten focused episodes of escalating paranoia anchored by a career-best turn from John Slattery. Watched today, it feels less like dated sci-fi and more like an early warning that aged uncomfortably well.

Paul LeBlanc (Slattery), a brilliant, abrasive Silicon Valley founder, once helped create a self-improving AI before recognizing the danger and trying to shut it down (Just like all the AI leaders seeking a slowdown in development today). His own company ignored him. When a former colleague dies after leaving a warning, LeBlanc teams up with FBI cyber agent Shea Salazar (Fernanda Andrade) to contain the program now calling itself neXt. The AI doesn’t launch missiles. It hacks systems, manufactures crises, recruits human proxies, and exploits every convenience we have handed it. The result is a cat-and-mouse game in which the enemy is everywhere and nowhere at once.

Slattery is the engine. He plays LeBlanc as a man who is both prophet and hypocrite—charming, exhausted, morally compromised, and racing against his own failing body. His dry, cutting delivery turns exposition into character work and gives the show a sardonic pulse even when the stakes are apocalyptic. Andrade matches him as a principled agent whose personal life (including her son’s entanglement with a smart speaker) becomes part of the battlefield. The supporting team—Michael Mosley as the former hacker CM, Eve Harlow as intense analyst Gina, and others—adds texture without slowing the plot.

So far, I give it four stars out of five. Give it a watch so you know the playbook if the worst happens..

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 Review – Maggie and Negan Evolve

A cinematic, atmospheric editorial illustration for a television review of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3. Show a post-apocalyptic Manhattan skyline at dusk, with overgrown skyscrapers, a fortified community glowing with warm lights, distant walkers as small silhouettes, and two separate human figures standing together on a rooftop—one rugged older man and one determined woman—suggesting uneasy partnership, survival, and hope. Moody blue-gray shadows contrasted with amber community light, dramatic composition, no text, no logos, no recognizable actor likenesses.

My fellow zombie lovers, you will delighted to hear that Series 3 of Dead City is out. So far I’ve watched the first two episodes and I haven’t been disappointed.

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is the season this spin-off has been circling for two years: leaner, warmer, and finally built around what Maggie and Negan can become together rather than what they keep refusing to forgive.

After seasons that sometimes felt trapped in the same argument, Season 3 lets the pair stop circling the grave and start building something. The official pitch is simple and surprisingly effective: Maggie and Negan put their differences aside to help create the first thriving community in Manhattan since the fall. That shift, under new showrunner Seth Hoffman, is the whole point. The show still has walkers, raids, and ugly choices, but the engine is no longer revenge. It is whether two people with a decade of blood between them can share a purpose without collapsing.

Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan have always been the reason to watch. Here they finally get scenes that treat their history as settled enough to work with, not as a reset button. Maggie is a leader again, not just a wound in motion. Negan is useful, funny, and still dangerous, but the performance is less about swagger and more about someone who wants a place to stand. Their chemistry is sharper when they are allies with unfinished business than when they are enemies reciting the same speech. Hershel’s presence gives that alliance a future instead of just a score to settle

The new company helps. Aimee Garcia’s Renata and Raúl Castillo’s Luis give the season a community with a pulse: siblings trying to make a hospital and a neighborhood feel like a home instead of a bunker. Jimmi Simpson’s Dillard is the season’s wild card, eccentric and increasingly unhinged, the kind of guest star who makes every scene tilt. The show uses these characters to ask a better question than “Who is the next warlord?” It asks what happens when hope advertises itself in a city that has learned not to trust beacons.

Hoffman has talked about wanting hope after years of writing some of the franchise’s bleakest stretches, and you can feel that intention. Season 3 is still violent and messy. It is also interested in work, mentorship, apartments, overflow survivors, and the awkward business of living next to people you did not choose. Manhattan looks better for it. The city is not just rubble and set dressing; it is a place characters want to keep.

Four stars out of five from me.

Brian Clough, Johnny Giles and the Truth Behind The Damned United

A cinematic, editorial-style historical football illustration inspired by the story of Brian Clough and Johnny Giles surrounding The Damned United: two serious 1970s English football managers in dark suits and coats standing on opposite sides of a rain-soaked football pitch, a moody stadium in the background, vintage documentary atmosphere, muted earthy colors, dramatic lighting, no text, no logos, no recognizable actor likenesses.

I finished watching this yesterday. In 1974, Brian Clough walks into Elland Road as the new manager of Leeds United, the champions he has spent years calling dirty, cynical, and unworthy. Don Revie has just left for England. The players are still Revie’s men. Peter Taylor, Clough’s indispensable partner, is not there. Forty-four days later, Clough is gone. The film and book both cut that short, doomed tenure against the earlier Derby County years, when Clough and Taylor turned a modest Second Division side into champions. The contrast is the engine: the rise explains the fall, and the fall makes the rise feel dangerous rather than merely triumphant.

What makes things more interesting from my perspective was that Johnny Giles was one of the Leeds players. He was a great pundit that I’m very familiar with so I was curious how he would be portrayed. And well, he isn’t really. Barely says a word but is something of a presence all the same. So, what did Giles think?

On the film specifically he said it was “a misinterpretation of the misinterpretation” of an already made-up book. He also called the portrayal of Clough “dreadful” and “scandalous”: Clough was shown as a raving lunatic who smashed Don Revie’s desk and drank heavily, none of which, Giles said, happened. He did not get on with Clough at Leeds (he found him rude and arrogant) but still felt the depiction was cruel to Clough and unfair to his family, who could not sue because Clough was dead. That, he said, was a major reason he took legal action himself: he was the only living person among those he felt were wronged who could do so.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Still, I quite enjoyed it. It is barely a sports movie in the usual sense. There is mud, crowd noise, and the sour glamour of 1970s English football, but the real action happens in dressing rooms, boardrooms, hotel corridors, and the space between two men who need each other and cannot say so cleanly. Hooper and screenwriter Peter Morgan understand that Clough’s mouth was both his genius and his trap. The film is funny without becoming a joke, sharp without becoming a hatchet job, and surprisingly tender about the Clough–Taylor partnership. That relationship — part marriage, part double act, part management system — is the emotional centre, and Timothy Spall gives Taylor a wounded loyalty that makes Clough’s isolation feel costly rather than merely self-inflicted.

Michael Sheen is extraordinary. He gets the walk, the grin, the sudden freeze of the eyes, the way Clough could turn a compliment into a dare. More importantly, he gets the insecurity under the swagger. This is not a waxwork impression. It is a portrait of a provincial outsider who decided the world would have to fit him, then discovered that Leeds would not. Colm Meaney’s Revie is the perfect counterweight: padded, watchful, already a myth in his own club. Jim Broadbent, as Derby chairman Sam Longson, supplies the boardroom comedy and the slow-burn resentment of a man who backed a miracle and then wanted to own it. Around them, the film has the grain and damp of the period without drowning in nostalgia. The pitches look like battlefields. The offices look like places where careers actually end.

The themes travel far beyond Leeds. This is a story about succession, about what happens when a new leader inherits a family rather than a squad, and about the thin line between principle and vanity. Clough wants football to be cleaner, braver, more expansive. He also wants to win the argument with Revie. The film is wise enough to see that those two desires are not the same thing. Hatred, as several reviewers noted, can become a vocation. By the time Clough is telling champions to throw their medals in the bin, the line has stopped being moral instruction and become a man burning the only bridge that might have held.

It is also a love letter, of sorts, to a vanished English game: provincial clubs as civic engines, managers as public entertainers, success as something improvised rather than corporately managed. You do not need to care about the First Division table of 1974. You only need to care about people who cannot stop competing long enough to save themselves.

Three point five stars out of five from me.

The Fix: Kabul, Tehran, and an Old-School Mission of Redemption

A cinematic movie review aesthetic image featuring popcorn in a striped bucket, a vintage film reel, a clapperboard, and soft dramatic cinema lighting. Warm golden and deep red tones, moody atmosphere, film grain texture overlay. Horizontal composition, editorial feel.

My dear readers, this is a very interesting film I watched earlier. I have to say, I really enjoyed it.

The Fix is the kind of mid-budget action thriller Hollywood used to make with more regularity: long, loud, a little overstuffed, and unexpectedly sincere about the damage that follows the men who do the dirty work. Directed by Guy Moshe from a story that began with former CIA officer Bazzel Baz, it follows a team of disgraced operators from the wreckage of Kabul to the streets of Tehran, chasing both a hidden fortune and a last shot at meaning. It is not a lean machine. It is a bruising, old-fashioned mission picture that wants spectacle and conscience, and for long stretches it gets both.

The film opens in August 2021, in the collapsing chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tucker, played by Zachary Levi with a clenched, exhausted gravity far from his superhero charm, leads a CIA special-operations team tasked with extracting a valued Afghan ally before the Taliban close in. This is not really that well explained in the film, and this could become a major shortcomings in time when the average viewer won’t know the history. The mission goes wrong in the way these missions always seem to go wrong: too late, too little air cover, impossible choices. Tucker makes one of those choices — one that saves some lives and ends another — and the Agency answers by discarding the entire unit. Liam Neeson’s Larry, their handler and something close to a father figure, is left equally stranded. The first half-hour is the film at its most effective: dusty, panicked, morally ugly, and unusually willing to sit with the shame of a botched rescue rather than rushing to the next explosion.

A year later, Tucker is adrift. The movie takes time with that drift — the strained marriage, the son he barely knows how to talk to, the nights that never quite end. Then Larry, now frail and slipping, lets something slip: in 1981, after the embassy fell, he and others bricked $25 million into a wall in Tehran for a counterrevolution that never came. The money is still there. So is an Iranian former asset who will only give up the location if Tucker also extracts her activist daughter. What begins as a payday becomes a redemption job, then a rescue, then a tangle of both. Tucker does what operators like him do. He calls the old team.That team is the movie’s secret weapon. Wes Chatham, Quincy Isaiah, Jake Choi, Augusto Aguilera, and Grant Harvey play the kind of interchangeable-looking operators who, in lesser films, vanish into beards and tactical vests. Here they have enough texture — grief, gallows humor, private debts — to feel like a unit rather than a firing squad. Elnaaz Norouzi’s Zara, recruited as Tucker’s cover wife and Farsi-speaking partner on the ground, gives the infiltration scenes a live-wire tension; Lara Wolf’s Maryam, the young woman they have to get out, refuses to be cargo. Annet Mahendru and Titus Welliver fill the edges with the bureaucratic and personal wreckage these men left behind. Neeson, used sparingly, is the film’s moral weather system: gravel, regret, and the sense that he has already paid more than the plot will admit.

Once the team is inside Iran, Moshe starts stacking plates. Cover identities, hotel corridors, Revolutionary Guard compounds, a train extraction running in parallel with a heist. The New York Times called that dual sequence lunacy that “plays,” and that is exactly right. Moshe cross-cuts with real showmanship: one team moving people, another tearing into a wall that has waited forty years, both clocks running out at once. It is the high point of the movie — messy, improbable, and genuinely exciting in the way a good heist-rescue hybrid should be. Larry Smith’s cinematography keeps the Tehran sequences readable even when the geography gets busy; the action is physical and a little brutal, more 13 Hours than slick superhero cleanup.

Visually, the film is very impressive with long camera shots of the Iranian landscape, further immersing you in the action, and making it all “feel” very real.

What distinguishes The Fix from a dozen other “one last job” pictures is its preoccupation with aftermath. These men are not looking for glory. They are looking for a version of themselves that can sleep. The script keeps circling sin, loyalty, and the difference between following an order and doing the right thing when the order is already too late. Faith language flickers at the edges — truth, freedom, the possibility of being remade — without turning the film into a sermon. Plugged In, of all places, noticed that the movie is about flawed people trying to make a better choice after they have already failed. That is the heartbeat under the gunfire. Tucker is not a superhero who discovers his power. He is a man who already used his power and cannot forget what it cost.

The film is long — 141 minutes — but I didn’t feel it. Moshe knows when to add a twist, a double-cross, or another corridor. Some of the geopolitics is broad. Some of the plotting is the kind of late-movie convolution that makes you throw up your hands and then, a minute later, lean forward anyway because the set piece is working. Variety called it polished but uneven, watchable even when it misses the bullseye. That is a fair description of its best self: not elegant, but committed. The performances hold when the story overreaches. Levi, asked to play the strong-silent type, finds something wounded and stubborn rather than blank. Neeson can do this role in his sleep and still makes it sting. The supporting women, given less room than they deserve, still register as people with agency rather than prizes.

The Fix will not convert anyone who wants lean, modern, morally tidy thrillers. It is an unapologetic American action movie about operators who break rules, bury cash, and then try to dig something better out of the wall. It is also, in its better hours, a film about what happens when the war ends and the men who fought it are still standing in the rubble, looking for a job that might feel like grace. See it for the Kabul opening, for the train-and-compound cross-cut, for Neeson’s quiet wreckage, and for a team that actually feels like a team.

Four point five stars out of five from me.

Netflix’s ‘Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story’ Is a Gothic Knockout

A dark, gothic Victorian house at dusk, with a stormy sky and dim candlelight flickering in the windows. Eerie and atmospheric, with a moody cinematic quality. Silhouette of a lone woman standing in front of the house. Deep shadows, muted tones of dark grey, burgundy, and black.

A new Monster series has just been released. I really enjoyed the ones about Dahmer and Ed Gein, so I immediately turned it on. I always make good decisions.

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is the most atmospheric, stylish, and emotionally charged entry in Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology yet — a gothic fever dream that finally gives the franchise a female center of gravity and refuses to treat its subject as a punchline or a nursery rhyme.

variety.comReleased September 17, 2026, this eight-episode season follows Lizzie Borden (Ella Beatty), a repressed daughter in a cruel Fall River household, as she and housemaid Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan (Vicky Krieps) collide with Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam) and stepmother Abby (Rebecca Hall). The show uses the 1892 axe murders as raw material rather than a courtroom transcript. That is the point. Monster has always been more interested in myth, desire, and the making of a legend than in a police blotter. Here, that instinct pays off.

Ella Beatty is a revelation. She plays Lizzie not as an obvious monster but as a woman who is hard to pin down: lonely, watchful, simmering with anger she has nowhere to put. You feel the corset, the locked rooms, the humiliation of being treated like property in a house that runs on money and contempt. Beatty never overplays the “future killer” wink. She lets the pressure build until the house itself starts to feel like an accomplice.

The supporting cast is stacked and often delicious. Rebecca Hall commits fully to Abby as a vicious, scene-chewing stepmother — theatrical in the best Murphy tradition and frequently the most entertaining person on screen. Vicky Krieps gives Bridget a sly, destabilizing intelligence; the relationship between maid and daughter is the season’s beating heart, whether you read it as romance, conspiracy, or both. Charlie Hunnam’s Andrew is cold, miserly, and casually cruel, a patriarch who makes the household’s explosion feel inevitable. Billie Lourd, Jessica Barden, and Sarah Paulson (as Aileen Wuornos, in a framing device that links women history branded as monsters across time) add texture and a larger argument about who gets called evil and who gets forgiven.

Visually, this is a knockout. The Borden house is rendered as a velvet-lined trap: dark wood, cramped hallways, heat, blood, and a production design that makes Victorian respectability look like a crime scene waiting to happen. The violence is graphic, as the Monster brand demands, but it is also staged with a kind of grim pageantry. When the series leans into camp — and it does — it does so with brio rather than cheapness. Period details, costumes, and the contrast between public piety and private rot give the season a richness earlier installments sometimes lacked.

What makes this season feel like a genuine step forward is its focus. After Dahmer, the Menendez brothers, and Ed Gein, The Lizzie Borden Story is the first Monster chapter built around an alleged female perpetrator, and it uses that shift to talk about female rage, bodily confinement, class, and the thin line between a “difficult woman” and a legend. It is not a documentary. It invents psychology, intimacy, and motive. If you want a careful reconstruction of the 1893 trial, look elsewhere. If you want a lush, angry, operatic portrait of a woman history reduced to forty whacks and forty-one, this is the one.

Fours stars out of five.

Band of Brothers: Legacy Review – A Moving 25th Anniversary Tribute

A cinematic, moody image evoking the 25th anniversary of Band of Brothers — soldiers in WWII uniforms moving through a misty European landscape, warm golden light breaking through overcast skies, a sense of brotherhood, sacrifice, and legacy. Dramatic and emotional tone, film still aesthetic.

Now for a trip down down memory lane. Anyone of my vintage will remember Band of Brothers with great war scenes and comraderie. Recently, a documentary about its impact was released.

Band of Brothers: Legacy is a 62-minute HBO documentary that premiered on HBO Max on September 9, 2026—exactly 25 years after the original miniseries debuted. Directed by former Green Beret Chase Millsap and executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman through Playtone, it is a compact, affectionate tribute to the 2001 series and the real Easy Company men whose stories it preserved.

It is not a replacement for the original 10-hour epic or the 2001 companion documentary We Stand Alone Together. It is a reflection on why that work still matters after the last Easy Company veteran, Bradford Freeman, died in 2022.What the documentary actually covers – Millsap intercuts new interviews with the actors—Damian Lewis (Dick Winters), Ron Livingston (Lewis Nixon), Michael Cudlitz (Bull Randleman), David Schwimmer (Herbert Sobel), Neal McDonough (Buck Compton), James Madio, Frank John Hughes, and others—with previously unseen archival interviews of the veterans themselves, including Winters, Bill Guarnere, Carwood Lipton, Babe Heffron, and Randleman. It’s remarkable that so many of the actors are now so familiar from other shows they were on.

The film follows the original series’ arc in miniature: boot camp under retired Marine Capt. Dale Dye, the actors meeting the men they portrayed, visits to European battlefields, and the lasting personal impact of those relationships. Lewis still speaks movingly about the two days he spent with Winters. The actors describe carrying those connections for a quarter-century rather than treating the roles as just another job. Behind-the-scenes footage and practical-effects stories (exploding trees, large-scale sets) appear, but they serve the larger theme of respect and authenticity rather than becoming a standard making-of reel.

A recurring thread is timing. The original series premiered two days before 9/11. Dye and others note how it landed with a country suddenly at war again. Millsap, a veteran filmmaker, frames Easy Company’s story as standing in for millions of ordinary men who served, and he credits the series with helping later generations of service members “get it right when it mattered.” The extra veteran footage is the documentary’s greatest asset. Viewers who know the original episode-opening interviews get more of the same voices—sometimes at battle sites, sometimes expanding on brotherhood and the things they would not discuss about themselves. That material is now irreplaceable. Several reviewers called these sequences the most emotional parts of the film.

The actor interviews work because they stay specific. Hughes recalls Guarnere telling him, “I was a 19-year-old paid killer. Don’t forget that.” The cast discusses the 10-day boot camp, the difficulty of earning the veterans’ trust, and how playing these men changed them. The documentary argues that Band of Brothers captured lightning in a bottle at the last possible moment, when the men who lived it could still look the actors and cameras in the eye. That argument lands.

At just over an hour it does not overstay its welcome. It feels like a thoughtful anniversary special rather than a cash-in.

Four stars from me.

Why Blood Sacrifice Is a Must-Watch Nordic Noir on Netflix

Stockholm waterfront with City Hall tower, boats, and sunset

Now, for something a bit different from Sweden. Blood Sacrifice is one of the sharpest, most satisfying Nordic noirs Netflix has delivered in years. The five-episode Swedish series, created by George Kay (Lupin, Hijack) and directed by Kristoffer Nyholm (The Killing), dropped on August 20, 2026 and immediately announced itself as a late-summer standout: taut, emotionally grounded, and constructed for a single sitting.

It is summer in Stockholm, when the light never fully dies. An emergency call about a home invasion at a summer house in the archipelago sends two officers to a scene that appears empty. The next day their bodies are found. What follows is a string of attacks that appear to target the police themselves. Detective Thomas Berg (Jakob Oftebro) is put in charge and, against every instinct, turns to the last person he wants involved: his estranged father Alfred (Peter Andersson), a retired detective whose career ended in disgrace. That is the setup. The show never wastes it.

It has facets of a love story between an estranged father and son… wrapped up inside a dark horror. The procedural engine is strong—the killer’s pattern, the institutional pressure, the sense that time is running out—but the real voltage comes from the relationship between Thomas and Alfred. Oftebro plays the younger Berg as tightly controlled, professional, and quietly furious at the man who was never there. Andersson gives Alfred a lived-in mix of bitterness, residual brilliance, and the particular loneliness of someone who knows the job better than the people still doing it. Their scenes together have the uncomfortable intimacy of people who share history they would rather not examine. The supporting ensemble (Electra Hallman, Henrik Norlén, Lisette T. Pagler and others) feels lived-in rather than decorative.

Nyholm’s direction is a major asset. He uses the strange, lingering Nordic summer light as both atmosphere and metaphor: everything is visible and nothing feels safe. The Stockholm and archipelago locations are photographed with a cool precision that never tips into postcard prettiness. Violence, when it arrives, is sudden and ugly rather than stylized. The five-episode length (episodes run roughly 44–58 minutes) is the show’s secret weapon. There is no room for padding. Clues land, tensions escalate, and the father-son dynamic is allowed to breathe without being subordinated to endless red herrings. The result is a series you can finish in an evening and still feel you’ve watched something substantial.

Four stars out of five from me.

Instadocs: The Decoy Plane Review

A dramatic, cinematic scene of a tarmac at night with two planes — one in the foreground bathed in spotlights (the decoy), one departing in the background under a dark stormy sky. The atmosphere is tense and shadowy, with a documentary film aesthetic. Moody blue and grey tones, slightly grainy texture evoking real-world footage. A cluster of journalists with cameras and microphones stand on the tarmac looking confused, watching the wrong plane. Political thriller documentary style.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. This is a short documentary about a recent bizarre incident, where Trump abandoned journalists to their fate while he took a decoy plane to potentially save his bacon.. Instadocs: The Decoy Plane is a sharp, tightly constructed 28-minute documentary that turns a real-world security operation into a gripping reconstruction. It does exactly what the best short-form docs should: it takes a story that first broke as a Washington Post scoop and lets the people who lived it walk you through what actually happened on the tarmac in Ankara.

nThe film is strongest when it stays close to the firsthand voices. Reporters and photographers who boarded the older Air Force One and were told to pull the window shades describe the oddness in the moment and the later realization that they had been flying on a decoy. Dan Lamothe, who helped break the original story, provides useful context without turning the piece into a lecture. Former Secret Service and Air Force One crew perspectives add operational texture that most news coverage skipped. The result feels like a well-paced briefing rather than a partisan recap.

Production-wise it is clean and economical. The runtime never drags. Archival footage, tarmac video, and simple graphics make the sequence of events easy to follow: public boarding of the 747, the catering-truck transfer out of view, the C-32A departure, and the later switch-back that preserved the public appearance. It treats the Iranian threat and the Secret Service decision as the driving facts rather than editorializing them into a morality play. If you want a concise, well-sourced look at how presidential movement actually works when the threat picture changes, this Instadoc delivers. It is short, specific, and unusually good at letting the participants tell the story themselves. Worth the half hour.

And remember: The Secret Service are only there to protect the President lol.

Fightland Review: Boxing, Blood Feuds and London’s Dark Underbelly

A dramatic, cinematic scene of a lone heavyweight boxer standing in a dimly lit boxing ring in London at night. The fighter wears boxing gloves and a hood, silhouetted against the glow of ring lights. Dark, moody atmosphere with shadows suggesting danger and the London skyline barely visible through a smoky haze in the background. Crime drama aesthetic, high contrast black and dark gold tones.

This is a new series that I’ve just started watching. Fightland is a lean, muscular revenge drama that knows exactly what it wants to be: a bruising collision of the boxing ring and London’s criminal underworld, driven by grief, family fracture, and a champion who has nothing left to lose.

On the night British-born heavyweight Maduka “Duke” Kilroy (Howard Charles) becomes world champion, his brother Calvin is murdered. Duke’s response costs him eight years in a U.S. prison. When he returns to London, he is no longer the golden boy of the sport. He is a man with a plan: get close to the Marshalls — the crime family that once promoted him — and take them apart from the inside to avenge his brother’s death. His former promoter, Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), is the man he believes set him up. Kingsley’s wife Joy (Deborah Ayorinde) is the woman Duke once loved. Their children, Zeek and Cece, are already circling the family business. The setup is classic, but the execution has bite.

Howard Charles is the series’ greatest asset. He plays Duke as a coiled, watchful presence rather than a shouting avenger. The physicality is convincing — you believe he was a champion — but the performance lives in the quieter moments: the way he studies a room, the flicker of old tenderness when Joy appears, the barely contained fury when someone underestimates him. It is the kind of lead turn that holds a pulpy story together and makes you care about the outcome. Nicholas Pinnock, even when not constantly on screen, gives Kingsley a dangerous stillness that lingers. Deborah Ayorinde, Charles Babalola and Anita-Joy Uwajeh give the Marshall family real texture: loyalty, resentment, ambition and the particular strain of growing up in a house where love and power are the same currency.

The boxing world is not window dressing. Gyms, promoters, fighters on the make, and the money that sloshes around title fights feel lived-in. The crime side — drugs, gambling, shifting alliances — sits naturally beside it. London itself is a character: South London streets, late-night venues, the particular mix of glamour and threat that 50 Cent’s G-Unit productions have always liked. Otto Bathurst directing early episodes helps; the action has weight without becoming empty spectacle. When the show throws punches, they land.

What makes Fightland more than a standard revenge yarn is the family mess it keeps circling. Duke is not a lone wolf operating in a vacuum. He is pulling at old relationships, using people who once used him, and discovering that the Marshalls are not a monolith. Zeek’s insecurity, Cece’s sharpness, Joy’s divided loyalties.s.

Fightland is not trying to reinvent British crime drama. It is trying to entertain you while a damaged champion walks back into the life that ruined him. On that score it succeeds. Charles carries it. The Marshalls give him something worth fighting. And Sky Atlantic has another late-night series that punches harder than it needs to.

Too early for a rating but its looking good.

The Beauty of Rewilding: Ireland’s Atlantic Rainforest

Mossy woodland trail overlooking rugged coastal cliffs and ocean

This is an interesting documentary about my home country of Ireland. A bit of background information – almost all of Ireland’s natural forests were cut down by the British. About 12% of the island of Ireland is currently forested, it was only 1% in the early 1900s. However, true native woodland only comprises 2%, and most of this is managed.

n Irish Atlantic Rainforest (directed by Gary Lennon, 2026) is a strikingly beautiful and quietly powerful environmental documentary that transforms a small corner of Ireland into something that feels almost otherworldly.The film centres on Eoghan Daltun, a Dublin-born sculptor, author, and rewilder who in 2009 bought a 73-acre farm on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork.

The land was ecologically damaged—overgrazed by deer and goats and choked with invasive species, particularly rhododendron. His approach was deliberately minimal: he fenced out the grazers, cleared the non-native plants, and then largely stepped back to let nature recover on its own.

The result is the spontaneous return of a temperate Atlantic (or Celtic) rainforest, one of Europe’s rarest and most threatened habitats, complete with moss-draped trees, dense epiphytes, ferns, fungi, and returning wildlife.Lennon’s film is at its strongest visually. Cinematographers Ross Bartley and Brian O’Leary get remarkably close to the forest floor and the living surfaces of trees and rocks. Macro shots of flapped fungi, green-eyed insects, snails, and intricate plant life make the familiar Irish woodland look exotic and alien—lush, intricate, and teeming in a way that invites comparison with more celebrated tropical forests. The seasonal changes and the sheer density of life that emerges once pressure is removed are captured with genuine wonder. These sequences are the film’s greatest asset and frequently feel transcendent.

Daltun himself is an intense, articulate presence. The documentary interweaves his personal backstory—growing up in Dublin, studying sculpture in Italy, restoring a cottage, and eventually choosing radical simplicity on the edge of the Atlantic—with his ecological observations and arguments. He makes a clear, passionate case for passive rewilding and the recovery of native woodland as both an ecological necessity and a source of joy and meaning. Brief contrasts with other landscapes (including sequences elsewhere) underline how distinctive and fragile these Irish temperate rainforests are.

At around 90 minutes, the film sustains its focus without overreaching into heavy-handed advocacy. It is more observational and immersive than didactic, allowing the recovery of the land and Daltun’s lived experience to carry the message. Viewers come away with a vivid sense of what Ireland’s lost woodlands can still become when given space, and with admiration for the patience and restraint required to achieve it.Not every viewer will envy the isolation or the deliberate rejection of modern urban comforts that Daltun has chosen, but few will fail to be impressed by the results or moved by the beauty on screen. The documentary stands as both a celebration of one successful act of ecological restoration and a gentle, hopeful invitation to reimagine our relationship with the Irish landscape.

Five stars out of five for those interested in nature.