Michael Winterbottom’s freewheeling 2002 film about Tony Wilson, champion of post-punk bands, couldn’t have starred anyone but Steve Coogan

Michael Winterbottom’s intriguing, daring, freewheeling movie is being rereleased on its almost-quarter-century anniversary. It is about Manchester legend, Factory Records impresario, club owner and Granada TV journalist Tony Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, who was a driving entrepreneurial force behind the city’s music scene and guide to bands such as Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays.

Looking back to my original review I see that I was in some ways unconvinced, perhaps by the almost flippant, throwaway tone that is somehow evenly established from first to last, with Coogan’s Partridgean lead performance – very good though it undoubtedly is – delivering all the lines as if doing a wry piece to camera. He was arguably the only possible casting for a minor TV personality who was also a major player in the real world beyond the camera, a postmodern combination that Wilson, a sophisticated and intelligent man, himself surely savoured. Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story, adapted from Laurence Sterne, is sometimes described as his postmodern work, although this film, with its fourth-wall breaking, real-world cameos and docu-realist sense of itself, is probably even more metatextual.

The rebooted GCHQ digital warfare series has more zip than its predecessor – but people bashing away on computers in a bunker near Cheltenham is inherently unsexy

If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.

In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.

The latest in our ongoing series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort watches is a journey back to 2004 and the unusually violent village of Sandford

With the endless library of films we all have at our fingertips, in our DVD collections and on whatever the cloud is, finding your top feelgood movie can be a deceptively hard task. Though it seems obvious now, mine was so familiar to me that somehow it managed to hide in plain sight. Eventually, I had to ask my partner what she thought my comfort movie was. She answered decisively: Hot Fuzz. And she’s absolutely right. How could it not be?

Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright’s second entry in his Cornetto trilogy, preceded by the cult classic Shaun of the Dead and followed by pub crawl alien invasion adventure The World’s End. I’m not convinced Hot Fuzz is Wright’s best film – it’s not even my favourite. But as far as feelgood movies go, it’s unbeatable.