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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.1 – ‘Switch’
The shadow of Breaking Bad loomed heavy over Better Call Saul last year. I was quietly confident this spin-off would make for good television, and that proved to be true—thanks in no small part to the writers finding hidden depths to Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) during the years before he met Walter White. We learned…
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VINYL, 1.1 – ‘Pilot’
How you respond to Vinyl will almost certainly depend on your tolerance for that great staple of cable television: the heavily conflicted white male anti-hero. As Richie Finestra—troubled record label boss and lapsed coke addict—Bobby Cannavale turns in a powerhouse performance in this two-hour pilot: raging, rampaging, and raw. The problem is that it’s slightly…
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THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
While the Oscars often overlook genre movies, horror movies, in particular, are rarely included among the Academy’s nominees. The exceptions tend to prove the rule, as with Psycho (which earned a handful of nominations but came up empty-handed), or The Exorcist (which was nominated for Best Picture but lost to The Sting). The biggest exception…
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DEADPOOL (2016)
Let’s start with the good news: this version of Deadpool is a hundred times more entertaining than the first outing for the offbeat superhero, in the atrocious X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland), director Tim Miller, and producer-star Ryan Reynolds know exactly what they’re doing with their version of this cult…
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE & ZOMBIES (2016)
Based both on Jane Austen’s classic Pride & Prejudice and Seth Grahame-Smith’s parody novel of the same name—adding re-animated corpses into the equation—Pride & Prejudice & Zombies retells the familiar Austen story that’s been adapted almost a dozen times already. This time, though, author Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) uses a zombie outbreak to change the…
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THE LOBSTER (2015)
It has been clear for some time that the leading lights of the ‘weird wave’ of Greek cinema would not be able to remain in Greece for much longer. For obvious reasons, in Greece, there’s simply no money to make movies with. This never held back Yorgos Lanthimos, as the director made Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth…
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THE X-FILES – ‘Home Again’
When I first heard Glen Morgan would be writing an episode entitled “Home Again”, I envisioned an unexpected sequel to infamous season 4 episode “Home”, about a family of inbred murderers, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, this was a decent hour that suddenly means The X-Files’ revival could end its maddeningly short run with…
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HAIL, CAESAR! (2016)
The Coen brothers’ filmography is heavily populated with desks and the men who sit behind them. In the Coens’ universe, desks serve to define the power dynamic for the characters sitting on either side of them; for the person behind it, the desk signifies control or, in the case of characters like Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard…
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DAD’S ARMY (2016)
Among the fine tradition of classic British sitcoms, few stand as revered—or, indeed, as British—as Dad’s Army. Set during World War II, this beloved BBC comedy followed the aged members of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard: a loose military unit patrolling their quiet coastal town. They were a collection of doddery old geezers and the sort…
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GOOSEBUMPS (2015)
If you grew up in the ’90s, there’s a good chance R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books were one of your formative forays into fiction. A series of very accessible mild horror novels, his stories were renowned for their sense of humour and notorious for their twists. They were many children’s window into not just reading, but also the horror/fantasy…
