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5 New U.K TV Shows to Watch this Autumn
The British television industry doesn’t work to the seasonal schedules of our American cousins, strictly speaking, but it remains true autumn is a time when lots of new drama and comedy tend to debut. It’s much trickier knowing exactly when new shows are due, because UK television’s not very willing to ‘plant a flag’ in the schedule…
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EVEREST (2015)
When a film’s based on a true story, it often means it’s telling such an incredible story that it’s hard to believe it’s actually true; or it can occasionally mean it’s tragic and sad enough to remind you about the harsh realities of our lives. Everest is the latter kind of true story. This is…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Summer’
It couldn’t last, could it? The relative breeze that was the opening episode of This is England 90 has proved, as expected, to be a false flag—making way for something altogether more familiar and frightening in this compelling second episode. Now in the summer of 1990, this instalment sent the young and reckless members of the gang—Harvey…
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DOCTOR WHO, 9.1 – ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’
Would you leave a child to die on a battlefield? Well, you might have second thoughts if that child was Davros (Joey Price), the future creator of the Daleks. That’s the dilemma for The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) when he inadvertently drops in on the Thousand Year War between the Kaleds and the Thals in “The…
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RICKI AND THE FLASH (2015)
I intended to begin this review by commenting on how infrequently Jonathan Demme’s in the director’s chair these days, but a quick look at his IMDb page proved me wrong. For a man in his early seventies, Demme is actually quite prolific, spending much of the past several years directing shorts and TV episodes in…
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THE MESSENGER (2015)
Labels can be a tricky thing for a film to come lumbered with. Genre is an ever-flexible thing and films don’t always fall unequivocally into one group or another. For instance, Wikipedia describes this new Robert Sheehan vehicle The Messenger as a “supernatural mystery horror”, but that’s not right at all. Whatever film those three adjectives suggest…
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SHOW ME A HERO – Part Five & Six
It may have taken its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy” but as David Simon and William F. Zorzi’s six-part series moved towards it’s brutal, brilliant endgame, it became increasingly clear that another Fitzgerald quote was equally, if not more, apposite: “There are no second…
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THIS IS ENGLAND ’90 – ‘Spring’
Early on in the first episode of This is England ’90, Gadget (Andrew Ellis)—who might as well have been looking straight down the lens at the home viewers—commented to friends Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) and Milky (Andrew Shim) that the reason they all wanted to still eat school dinners still was “… about the nostalgia, innit.…
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Interview: French filmmaker Rémy Gente, creator of THE STRAIN’s special opening titles
If you’re watching FX’s vampire drama The Strain this season, you can’t have missed the show’s special opening titles, which appeared during episode 9’s “The Battle for Red Hook”. The normal ones are just dimly-lit shots of dirty bathroom tiles smeared with the show’s title in blood, but episode 9’s were a sumptuous feast of graphic novel inspired…
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MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT (2014)
“Gotta give the crowd what they want, baby,” a character says early on in Monsters: Dark Continent, as a group of gamblers crowd around an underground dog fight. What is it they want? “Blood.” Though the character’s referring to that disturbing fight that plays out in the first act of Tom Green’s follow-up to Monsters,…
