Cinema Essentials

Tom Clancy's fictional CIA analyst Jack Ryan gets a fifth film outing in  Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit , this time played by a new actor in Chris Pine. The film begins in 2001 with the young Jack Ryan studying at the London School of Economics, presented in this film as a sort of leafy parkland campus in central London. Galvanised by the 9/11 terror attacks, Ryan decides to serve his country and enlists in the US Marines. He is later injured when the helicopter he is travelling in is hit by a missile strike in Afghanistan in 2003. He subsequently undergoes rehabilitation at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland, where he meets attractive medical student Cathy Muller (Keira Knightley).  Around the same time, Ryan is also approached by the CIA in the form of Thomas Harper (Kevin Costner), who has been impressed by Ryan's exciting works on "Liquidity Events in Post-Soviet Markets" and his reports on Russian traffic patterns. Apparently. Ryan is then recruited by the CI

Fortunately for the rest of Europe, Nazi Germany never did succeed in its efforts to invade Great Britain. Following the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in France in 1940, a German invasion across the English Channel seemed to be imminent. But with the Germans unable to gain air superiority over southern England during the Battle of Britain, the plans for invasion had to be abandoned.  But the counterfactual "What If?" of a successful German invasion of Britain in World War II has turned up in books, TV series and films many times since then. Here are some of the times the Nazis did successfully invade - at least in film and TV.

Jane was the curvaceous comic strip heroine who helped to keep the British end up during World War II. She was the creation of cartoonist Norman Pett, who produced her adventures in serial form in the Daily Mirror newspaper from 1932 until 1959, originally as  Jane's Journal, The Diary of a Bright Young Thing . But it was during the Second World War that Jane reached the peak of her popularity.

The 1960s was an era not only of classic TV series, but also of classic TV theme tunes. No TV show of the era was complete without a catchy theme tune and, preferably, a memorable credits sequence too. The decade saw the western series dominant in the US and the historical adventures previously popular in the UK give way to other genres, including sci-fi and, especially, secret agent series.  Here are 10 of the best TV themes of the era, from both sides of the Atlantic. These videos are all hosted on Youtube and videos are always being removed from there. So let me know if any of these are removed or if they aren't available in your country.

National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties  - also published as  National Heroes: The British Film Industry in the Seventies and Eighties -  is the second book in Alexander Walker's trilogy exploring British cinema from the 1960s to the turn of the millennium. The first book, Hollywood England , looked at the 1960s and the very beginning of the 1970s. National Heroes overlaps with that book a little, beginning in 1971 and ending in 1984.