Domhnall Gleeson

Radio Times review

Though Black Mirror sometimes lacks subtlety, that's sort of the point - we live in a world of ever-widening extremes. What the show does so cleverly is to merge this present reality with a sci-fi future so convincingly realised it seems more of a prediction than a warning. This series bettered the first, though the final episode, The Waldo Moment, suffered by comparison with the earlier instalments. Be Right Back, starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson, was a beautiful, haunting exploration of virtual life after death, while the horror of White Bear, where punishment became entertainment, was hard to shake off.

Charlie Brooker stares into the black mirror of modern life - we are all a blank screen - for a fresh trio of dark 'what if' tales. In this first disturbing drama, he toys with the notion that the little bits of ourselves we send out into the ether as tweets and status updates could be engineered to take on a life of their own - a kind of Frankenstein cyber-monster. So switch off your smartphone and settle back for a dystopian vision of life as young lovers Martha (Hayley Atwell) and social media addict boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) find their relationship takes an unnerving twist.

You'd be hard pushed to call the first part of Charlie Brooker's returning series a comedy. In fact, Be Right Back is often downright sad. Martha (Hayley Atwell, giving a career-best performance in a demanding role) is stuck in an isolated countryside cottage, mourning the loss of her partner, Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) - a guy she loved deeply in spite of his irritating obsession with Twitter. Then the opportunity arises to reconstruct his personality through his online history of emails, tweets, Facebook updates et al. Initially appalled, Martha's resolve starts to crumble as her loneliness intensifies, before some unexpected news forces her hand...

Even if, as with some of the first series of Black Mirror, the denouement can't quite live up to the restless invention and plausible clairvoyance of what's gone before, this is still high-calibre television bursting with ideas and emotional engagement.

There may not be any Prime Ministerial pig sex this time, but we're still confident that Charlie Brooker's dark satire Black Mirror will be just as disturbing and thought-provoking second time around.

In Be Right Back, the first of three new troubling tales from the Wipe mastermind, a grieving soul named Martha (Hayley Atwell) discovers that her deceased boyfriend Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) can be resurrected in digital form using information on his various social networking sites. Scarily believable, Black Mirror may convince you to log out of Facebook for good or think twice about what you type into Google.

First photograph of "Frank" film

The first photo from the set of the film Frank. Frank is a comedy about a young wannabe musician, Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), who discovers he's bitten off more than he can chew when he joins a band of eccentric pop musicians led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank (Michael Fassbender) and his terrifying sidekick Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Frank is based on the memoir by Jon Ronson and is a fictional story loosely inspired by Frank Sidebottom, the persona of cult musician and comedy legend Chris Sievey.