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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.10 – ‘Klick’
It’s a little miracle that Better Call Saul can deliver such a fantastic season finale, without the need for anything particularly earth-shattering to happen. Events are just allowed to unfold in a very plausible way, and we’re now so invested in the core relationships that the tiniest of things can cause a great deal of…
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HAP AND LEONARD – Season One
Hap and Leonard, the latest US crime series to find its way to Amazon Video in the UK, is something of an odd beast. Adapted from Joe R. Lansdale’s best-selling novels, by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle, who also worked on the excellent Lansdale adaptation Cold in July, and with a top-notch cast headed up…
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HUSH (2016)
A fleeting glance of Hush while browsing Netflix and you’d be forgiven for having a reflexive urge to keep scrolling. ‘A young woman living alone in the woods is terrorised by a masked serial killer’—sound familiar? However, while this horror film has its flaws, if you look past the tropes and bargain bin poster you’ll…
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THE AMERICANS, 4.5 – ‘Clark’s Place’
After the shocking ending of last week’s episode, “Clark’s Place” was an episode for The Americans to do its customary thing, after a major story development, of bringing things back down to a slow burn. None of the show’s storylines are advanced very much; instead, lots of time is devoted to subtle character beats and ratcheting…
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THE JUNGLE BOOK (2016)
It’s easy to condemn Disney for adapting its animations into live-action, as it seems like a creatively bankrupt endeavour, but the success of 2015’s Cinderella provided reason to hope it’s less cynical than it seems. Thankfully, Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book continues what could be a successful trend from the studio, as his film finds…
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OUTLANDER, 2.1 – ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’
Readers of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels were in for a bit of a surprise this week with the broadcast of “Through A Glass, Darkly”, season 2’s opener of Starz’s adaptation of the historical fantasy drama. In Gabaldon’s second novel, Dragonfly in Amber, nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe)—holidaying in the Scotland of 1945 and whisked away to the Jacobite…
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VINYL, 1.8-9 – ‘E.A.B’ & ‘Rock & Roll Queen’
I don’t know whether I’m suffering from full-blown Stockholm system, or whether Vinyl has improved tremendously over the course of its run, but I genuinely enjoyed the two latest episodes. “E.A.B” and “Rock and Roll Queen” were a strong mix of the better parts of the music plot lines (the fact that American Century isn’t…
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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.9 – ‘Nailed’
Given the title “Nailed”, you’d be forgiven for thinking the big climax of Better Call Saul’s penultimate hour would involve an exciting set-piece where Mike (Jonathan Banks) uses his homemade ‘spike strip’ on one of Hector Salamanca’s drug-carrying trucks. Instead, it came down to Chuck (Michael McKean) simply arguing with an employee of a xerox…
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BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR (1990)
What stops me joining the cult of Re-Animator is how reductive the franchise is. Stuart Gordon’s original 1985 movie is a schlocky update of a 1921 novella by H.P Lovecraft—entitled Herbert West—Reanimator—widely regarded as the author’s worst effort. A lame parody of Mary Shelley’s trailblazing Frankenstein, Lovecraft himself admitted he only wrote it for the…
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DAREDEVIL – Season Two
It’s fair to say Netflix’s Daredevil was one of 2015’s biggest surprises, because it did something fresh with a superhero indebted to Batman, in a show with conceptual similarities to The CW’s Arrow, while overcoming a negative perception of Daredevil thanks to a misfiring 2003 movie. In going darker and meaner than everything else in…
