John Cena and Idris Elba star in 'bonkers' action-buddy comedy 

Just months after Viola Davis played a gun-toting US president saving the day at a G20 summit, along comes another "stupendously idiotic yet eminently watchable" action-buddy movie with a top-tier geopolitical setting, said Kevin Maher in The Times. 

This time, the "bickering protagonists" are the leaders of the US and the UK: President Will Derringer (John Cena), a crass populist and former Hollywood action-movie star; and British PM Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), a "cautious, rule-abiding politician" who is suffering "a conspicuous, Starmer-like slump in the polls".

The pair's relationship is initially antagonistic, but when the presidential plane they are travelling on to a Nato summit is attacked by terrorists, forcing them to bail out over Belarus, they start working together – "snapping necks, machine-gunning faceless henchmen and leaping from exploding helicopters" as they go. 

The early scenes are a bit awkward, said Olly Richards in Empire. But when Clarke and Derringer get stranded in a hostile country teeming with baddies, the film takes off. Clarke, an SAS veteran, proves a "competent survivalist", but Derringer discovers that his Hollywood action credentials don't mean much in real life.

Things become ever more daft as the film progresses, culminating in a "truly bonkers car chase that tests the boundaries of logic, physics and the feasible athleticism of middle-aged men".

The cast deliver handsomely, said Andrew Lawrence in The Guardian. Elba and Cena have proper odd-couple chemistry, and there's a nice turn from Priyanka Chopra as an MI6 agent. It's all "fun, fiery and totally frivolous" – in short, "a perfect summer movie".

by John Foot  

"Throughout the 1970s, Italy was convulsed by a series of bomb attacks, political kidnappings and assassinations" carried out by left-wing terrorists, said Ian Thomson in the Financial Times. Of the groups that operated during the anni di piombi ("years of lead"), the "most feared" was the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), which "combined a Marxist-Leninist utopianism with a murderous disregard for human life".

During its "18-year reign of terror", the group killed around 75 people and maimed hundreds. Its highest-profile victim was former prime minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped in March 1978 and whose bullet-riddled body was found 55 days later in the boot of a Renault 4.

Now John Foot, a professor of history at Bristol University, has written a "grimly absorbing" history of the brigatisti and their attempts to overthrow the Italian state. As his "superbly researched" book shows, the group subjected Italy to "some of the bloodiest acts of terrorism yet seen in an industrialised society" – all for nothing, as they never came close to realising their goals. Their story, Foot observes, amounted to a "national tragedy".

The Red Brigades was founded in 1970 by Renato Curcio, a student in Trento, his girlfriend (later wife) Margherita Cagol, and Alberto Franceschini, a communist from Reggio Emilia. "Its roots, however, lay much deeper," said Simon Gaul in Literary Review – in disquiet at America's influence over Italy, growing industrial unrest in the country's northern heartlands, and a belief that neo-fascists were plotting a military coup.

At first, the Red Brigades was backed financially by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the "increasingly activist publisher of 'The Leopard' and 'Doctor Zhivago'", said James Owen in The Times. But that source dried up in 1972, when Feltrinelli blew himself up while trying to detonate an electricity pylon outside Milan. Italy in the early 1970s had an "epidemic of kidnaps by organised crime groups", and the brigatisti jumped on this bandwagon, said Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. They first targeted industrialists or minor officials, but widened their net to include prominent politicians. And they upped the violence, adding kneecappings and executions to their repertoire ("Strike One to Educate 100" became their mantra).

Eventually, it became clear the group were "killing just because they could" – and as public support seeped away, they turned on each other, and finally disbanded in 1988. Based on exemplary scholarship, Foot's book provides a "fascinating insight" into these "moronic" fanatics.

ITN newsreader who reported on the fall of Saigon

Sandy Gall, who has died aged 97, became a household name as a newsreader for ITN. But he was "first and foremost a reporter", said The Daily Telegraph, who spent decades dashing between trouble spots, covering conflicts from the Mau Mau uprising of 1953 to the first Gulf War. He was among the few journalists in Saigon to see the North Vietnamese tanks entering the city in 1975; and in 1991 he followed Allied tanks into Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm, and got the first footage of its liberation. "Tall, self-confident and easygoing, his weather-beaten face etched with devil-may-care lines of tension, fortitude and laughter", he looked the part of the intrepid foreign correspondent, and he acted it. His reporting was authoritative, clear and concise, said The Times; and he risked his life many times to bring back the story.

Henderson Alexander Gall was born in 1927 in Penang, then Malaya, where his Scottish father managed a rubber plantation. Aged four he was sent home to live with relations. He was educated at Glenalmond College and, after national service, he studied modern languages at Aberdeen University. He joined Reuters a year after graduating. It sent him to Kenya, and then to Hungary, to report on the anti-Soviet uprising. He had one of his first brushes with death in 1960, when he was arrested while covering the Congo Crisis. "We were taken to a small room crowded with about 10 drunken soldiers with guns, and were told that we would be executed shortly," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Their officer threw soda water in my face, and we were ordered to strip and await execution." UN officials managed to secure their release. In 1972, after moving to ITN, he went to Uganda to report on the expulsion of Asians. He was thrown into an execution cell with blood spattered up the walls. The guards were high on drugs and they could hear prisoners being bludgeoned outside. Fortunately, Idi Amin decided after three days to expel the journalists instead.

He was in Vietnam in 1965, when the US sent in the marines; and covered the Tet Offensive in 1968. When he remained in Saigon in 1975, as the Vietcong approached, the fleeing British embassy staff gave him the keys to their club, so that he and other reporters could keep using its swimming pool. They shot eight hours of footage of the Vietcong's occupation but, back in London, there was a strike at ITN, and only 10 minutes of it was broadcast. Often he was disappointed by the footage of the conflicts he covered: it all looked so much smaller on TV.

In 1982 – when he was in his mid-50s – he and his crew trekked 150 miles across Afghanistan, dodging landmines and Soviet bombs, to interview Ahmad Shah Massoud, the guerilla leader who had holed up in the Panjshir Valley. Gall's family didn't hear from him for three months. It was one of many visits he made to Afghanistan to deliver despatches from behind the lines, in which he did much to draw public attention to the atrocities being perpetrated by the Soviets. He came to love the country, with its mountainous landscape and brave and hospitable people – it reminded him, he said, of Scotland, "but without the whisky". In 1983 he launched a charity there, which provided some 20,000 landmine victims with artificial limbs. His final appearance as a newsreader was in 1991; but he continued as a reporter. He had visited Kabul as recently as 2010; the last of his many books, published when he was 93, was about Shah Massoud. His wife Eleanor died in 2018. Their four children survive him.