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YOU, ME & THE APOCALYPSE – ‘Episode Three’
One of the things I like most about You, Me and the Apocalypse is the way the story’s slowly deepening every week. In episode three, we’re introduced a couple of big twists, which all felt earned, as well as giving us a great cameo (hello there, Nick Offerman—I would watch you in anything), which all…
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PAN (2015)
Early reviews suggested that Joe Wright’s Peter Pan prequel (which purports to tell how he became The Boy Who Never Grew Up) was a disaster on par with infamous 1987 flop Ishtar. It was apparently an overblown mess, which failed at being either a decent children’s movie or an enlightening origin tale. Indeed, a piece in Variety even asked whether Pan…
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JURASSIC WORLD (2015)
The Jurassic Park franchise has always been looking back 65 million years (wondering how modern man would cope with the return of prehistoric animals), but Jurassic World is a sequel with a stronger attachment to mere decades ago; when Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original wowed audiences. In that respect, certainly more than the previous two sequels, enough…
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THE LEFTOVERS, 2.2 – ‘A Matter of Geography’
After the premiere unexpectedly whisked us to the completely new location of Jarden, Texas (to introduce a whole new family who live there), “A Matter of Geography” delivered the opening episode most people were expecting: a chance to catchup with small-town cop Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) back in Mapleton, New…
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DOCTOR WHO, 9.4 – ‘Before the Flood’
The TARDIS feeling grumpy about temporal anomalies, and the tolling of the Cloister Bell, do not prepare you for the mind-scrambling deconstruction of the ‘bootstrap paradox’ The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) serves up in the pre-titles of “Before the Flood”. Rather than info-dump the nature of recursive time loops (a staple of SF literature, with said…
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WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (2014)
Times are tough for traditional, two-dimensional, hand drawn animation. The mainstream is dominated with glossy, shiny, digitally-animated movies that, while often hits with audiences, always struggle to conjure something as simple and as visually compelling as sensitively drawn pictures brought to life on the screen. The Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli has long been a…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Winter’
Breaking up is hard to do. Or at least that’s what The Carpenters told us. And if this was the break up of the This Is England franchise (I’m not convinced) then it’s fair to say it was hard for quite a few people. Hard for Shane Meadows to successfully tie and loop his beloved…
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YOU, ME & THE APOCALYPSE – ‘Episode Two’
Things kicked up a gear this week, as the effects of the on-coming apocalypse became clearer and we were introduced two new characters: Paterson Joseph’s preternaturally calm General Arnold Gaines, and his nervy sidekick Scotty (Cousin Francis from Poldark, actor Kyle Soller)—who also happens to be the brother of escaped convict Rhonda (Jenna Fischer). I also…
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AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL – ‘Checking In’
I skipped American Horror Story’s first season at the time because it looked like hot garbage. I wasn’t entirely wrong—I checked it out after friends encouraged me, and it is trash; but it’s trash that’s way more entertainingly bonkers than it has any right to be. I flat-out loved the second season, Asylum; as with the other…
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SICARIO (2015)
Do you like your meticulously-paced and superbly-shot action movies with a side order of bleak nihilism? You’re in luck: Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario may well be the film for you. But while there’s no doubt this thriller is highly accomplished in many ways, you should be warned it’s not for everyone. It’s wilfully vague throughout; shadowy in…
