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THE DANISH GIRL (2015)
Following on from their respective awards successes of late, a team-up between director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) should be a shoe-in for Oscar success. The prestige of those two names—along with the worthy story of The Danish Girl, and the nature of Redmayne’s committed, cross-gender performance—make this the…
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2015: The Best Things We Saw This Year
It wouldn’t be late-December without an exhaustive number of end-of-year lists appearing online, looking back on the year’s great and terrible. It would be rude the break with this tradition, so the writers of Frame Rated have each chosen one thing they most enjoyed watching in 2015. As a bonus, each writer’s also listed nine…
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DOCTOR WHO – ‘The Husbands of River Song’
When a man pops his head out of a police box door and asks a duffle-coated Matt Lucas for an opinion on the set of antlers he’s sporting, you have a choice: a post-Christmas dinner snooze or prop your eyelids open with matchsticks to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Husbands of River Song”.…
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HOME ALONE • HOME ALONE 2: LOST IN NEW YORK (1990/92)
To celebrate Christmas Day tomorrow, below are two retrospective reviews of the beloved Home Alone films from the early-1990s, directed by Chris Columbus, written by John Hughes, starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara and John Sheard… HOME ALONE (1990) Up until 1990’s Home Alone, director Chris Columbus was best-known for writing two seminal adventures…
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LUTHER – Series Four
It’s been two years since we last saw DCI John Luther (Idris Elba); the dishevelled, troubled, imposing detective with a knack for solving extremely violent cases. In the intervening years, following the death of his faithful partner DS Ripley (Warren Brown), Luther’s swapped standing on urban rooftops for country clifftops—as he’s left London, bought himself…
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JESSICA JONES – Season One
Whereas Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D is tethered to the unfolding sprawl of Marvel’s cinematic universe (with The Avengers as elephants-in-the-room), Netflix have found a smarter way to play in the studio’s sandpit. First with the esteemed Daredevil, and now with Jessica Jones, the VOD heavyweight keeps to its own tiny corner of Marvel’s playground—Hell’s Kitchen, New York City—with…
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THE KNICK, 2.10 – ‘This is All We Are’
The Knick has always been a series that boasted a wry and dark sense of humour, which was always necessary to offset the rather grim nature of most of its storylines. But for the season two finale—which may just be doubling up as a series finale, given the nature of how things play out, and…
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STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)
There’s a moment halfway through Star Wars: The Force Awakens when I realised I was completely on board with the movie. It’s the wordless exchange between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher as former flames Han Solo and General Organa (née Princess Leia), when they see each other for the first time in years. I was…
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AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL – ‘She Gets Revenge’
The high points of “She Gets Revenge” are the scenes between Liz (Denis O’Hare) and Douglas (Josh Braaten), the son she abandoned 31-years ago. The show’s sudden, earnest detours often end in heartbreak, so when we learned that Douglas would be staying at the Cortez, there was reason to worry for the young man. Surprisingly,…
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MR. ROBOT – Season One
There are some shows that make you sit up after the first episode and exclaim: ‘what was that I just watched?’ It’s the reaction I had after the first episode of The Sopranos, after the start of Veronica Mars, when Peaky Blinders came roaring onto the screen, and at the beginning of the year with…
