It’s one of the finest and bravest British works to ever grace the screen. Davies and anchored by a stellar ensemble cast, It’s A Sin succeeds in being profoundly joyful and heartachingly tragic all at once, making it a haunting homage to queer culture, life, and death amidst the 80s HIV/ AIDS epidemic. Penned principally by writer Chris Gabo, the moments that belong to In Treatment’s ‘Brooke’ and ‘Eladio’ (masterfully embodied by Uzo Aduba and Anthony Ramos) equate to nothing less than magic.

It’s a true feat of craft when an intimate exchange between two characters lingers with you days and months beyond the end credits.

Jenkins’s series is a corrective to American cultural history a memorial to the lives of African Americans past and present and, at its deepest level, an act of speculative autobiography and revisionist authorship by a Black American filmmaker.” (Devika Girish, S&S May) The Underground Railroad gives thick, viscous life to stories that, while spinning a fantastical yarn, also serve to fill an absence in our cultural and cinematic record.

Jenkins’s work grapples with a twofold task: to not just visualise things that never were, like a gleaming skyscraper piercing the sky in 1850s South Carolina, but also things that did happen but are too terrifying to witness – such as the grisly scene in the opening episode of an enslaved man being whipped and set on fire. We said: “A lustrous, richly detailed epic, shot in swooning colours by James Laxton and scored with a symphonic track by Nicholas Britell, Jenkins’s ten-episode adaptation of The Underground Railroad breathes evocative life into Whitehead’s magic realism. Indifferent profiteering is part of what Haigh interrogates here – “The money does what it wants to,” whaling tycoon Baxter (Tom Courtenay) assures ship’s captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham), “it don’t care what we prefer.” But as the strange and thorny rivalries and entanglements of this drama reveal, greed for profit is only part of what drives humans to besmirch the innocent and desecrate the beautiful.” (Hannah McGill, S&S October) The images captured serve to remind us of both the beauty of the region and the fact that its commercial exploitation has by now reached a point of no return. Shooting on location – drama has never been made so far north before – has secured a startling authenticity of atmosphere. Extraordinarily effective as both narrative and spectacle, this work is also an elegy to the purity of the Arctic. We said: “Andrew Haigh’s five-part adaptation of Ian McGuire’s 2016 novel compels on several levels: as an intensely felt meditation on masculinity, as a thrilling technical achievement and as a ripping yarn.

Ted queer as folk