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Greyhound (Apple TV+)

According to the end credits of Greyhound, some 3,500 Allied ships were lost during the Battle of the Atlantic, taking with them more than 72,000 men. Tom Hanks’s gripping but exhausting new film, based on the C. S. Forester novel The Good Shepherd, does a first-class job of showing us why such losses weren’t even higher.

Of course, cinematic tales of mid-Atlantic naval heroism aren’t new. The Cruel Sea, starring Jack Hawkins, is a British classic, but it’s almost 70 years old now. Nevertheless, Greyhound feels like its American counterpart, able to draw not just on a screenplay that Hanks himself has written but state-of-the-art visual effects that put us at the heart of the tense, terrifying, freezing-looking action.

In a film notably light on backstory, Hanks (right) plays Captain Krause, commanding a destroyer – call sign ‘Greyhound’ – for the first time as it escorts a convoy across a North Atlantic seemingly full of unseen U-boats. On one side of the Atlantic the convoy and its naval escorts is protected by American air cover; on the other by the RAF. But in between is the dangerous area known as the ‘black pit’, where the U-boats hunt in packs, like wolves.

Once it starts, the action is relentless as ‘Greyhound’, relying on primitive radar and sonar, rushes to and fro after U-boats that taunt them by radio and sink below the waves seconds before they arrive. With Hanks – the great everyman of American cinema – at the helm, you won’t want to miss a single moment.