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Win NOW TV with ‘Entertainment Pass’
It’s competition time at Frame Rated, to celebrate the site passing a milestone in articles we’ve published since launching last summer. We have a NOW TV Box from Sky available to win, which comes with a free 14-day trial of the ‘Entertainment’, ‘Sports’, or ‘Movies’ packages. Read more about NOW TV here. In addition, by redeeming a…
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THE ZERO BOYS (1986)
At its heart Arrow Films’ latest release, The Zero Boys, is just another straight-to-video slasher movie; of the type that dominated the 1980s home VHS revolution. However, dismissing it out of hand does it a disservice. It’s an interesting genre hybrid, morphing between action, teen romp, horror, and survival movie. The nature of the film…
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OUTLANDER, 2.3 – ‘Useful Occupations and Deceptions’
If an episode title could some up the contrary nature of Outlander—jumping from time travel romance to 18th-century espionage thriller—then “Useful Occupations and Deceptions” would fit the bill. The series can often frustrate the casual viewer with its tendency to swerve away from the action-adventure genre and instead indulge in the emotional doubts of its…
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GAME OF THRONES, 6.1 – ‘The Red Woman’
Forget ‘Who Shot J.R?’, the question on people’s lips since last summer has been ‘Is Jon Snow really dead?’, as Game of Thrones delivered one of its biggest shock-endings—with the Lord High Commander of the Night’s Watch knifed to death by some of his own men, then left for dead in a pool of blood.…
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CAMPING – Series One
It’s an indisputable fact that you need a very strong stomach to watch anything written by Julia Davis. From Human Remains to Nighty Night and, most recently, Hunderby, her shows mine the most uncomfortable parts of the human psyche; refracting our most grotesque selves back at us while almost daring the audience to look away.…
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THE AMERICANS, 4.6 – ‘The Rat’
For a series defined by restraint and deliberate pacing, the last few weeks of The Americans have seen a monumental change in the show’s status quo. I assumed that, after Nina’s sudden and shocking death, the show would retreat for several weeks, taking its time to wind up for the next big development. But no, two…
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JANE GOT A GUN (2016)
The Western is a genre that resolutely refuses to ride off into the sunset. Despite an increasing distance from the era—when America’s west was the great frontier; a harsh and wild land, daring man to tame it—and despite many academic opinions that the genre’s grown irrelevant, it still endures. First it gained a new spin…
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CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (2016)
Marvel films have gone big before. They’ve launched an alien invasion onto New York for The Avengers, seen half of London uprooted in Thor: The Dark World, and sent an entire city very literally crashing to the ground in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But they’ve never gone bigger than this. That’s not to say Captain…
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VINYL, 1.10 – ‘Alibi’
The final episode of Vinyl’s first season was also the last to be written by co-creator Terence Winter, who will be replaced for the second season by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) and Max Borenstein (Godzilla)—neither of whom have ever helmed a television series. It would be nice to say that the likeable and…
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OUTLANDER, 2.2 – ‘Not in Scotland Anymore’
And so, rather like The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, Outlander’s Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) find themselves over the English Channel, acclimatising to the profoundly different world of 18th-century France. However, while the cultivation of several vivid social connections dominates Ira Steven Behr’s “Not in Scotland Anymore”, the episode also spends some…
