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SENSE8 – Season One
Having invigorated sci-fi action with 1999’s The Matrix, Andy and Lana Wachowski have struggled to match their cyberpunk sensation. Two inferior sequels followed in 2003, then a trio of expensive failures in subsequent years (Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending). The directors’ move to Netflix may have felt unimaginable a few years ago, but is video-on-demand the best place for their…
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HANNIBAL, 3.3 – ‘Secondo’
It’s become inevitable for most popular franchises to eventually turn to a prequel or reboot that fills in the details of their characters’ origin stories. This is especially damaging with horror franchises that try to explain their monsters. To pick just one example, while I find Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies more interesting than most horror fans, a…
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GAME OF THRONES – Season Five
Warning: this review contains major spoilers for HBO’s Game of Thrones, not just the fifth season, so it’s recommend you don’t read until you’ve seen up to the “Mother’s Mercy” finale. Oh, no, they killed Jon Snow! That was pretty much the reaction of 90% of Game of Thrones‘s viewers after “Mother’s Mercy”, the final episode of the…
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AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D – Season Two
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D occupies a unique position within Marvel’s expanding “cinematic universe”, in that it aims to be related to the movies, but separate from them. This means that almost nothing of true global significance can ever happen within the show’s purview, but the outlook extends to SHIELD’s role within the world at large. It’s a tricky…
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HUMANS – series one, episode one
In the alternate present depicted in AMC/Channel 4’s Humans, the world’s almost indistinguishable from our own, with one key difference: despite technology being roughly on par with reality, mankind’s developed lifelike android helpers known as “synths”. These synths look like real people, but are programmable and unthinking; acting as docile servants and housekeepers. The heart of…
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TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE (1990)
Anthology TV series are currently enjoying a minor resurgence, with the success of Channel 4’s Black Mirror, BBC2’s Inside No.9 and, in a looser sense, FX’s American Horror Story and HBO’s True Detective. But we’re still a far cry from the genre’s heyday (the 1950s to late-’80s), when shows like The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Outer…
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HANNIBAL, 3.2 – ‘Primavera’
While “Primavera” isn’t as strong as last week’s season premiere, it deserves special notice for offering one of the freakiest images so far, in a show that gets freaky on a regular basis. Hannibal’s valentine to Will Graham (Hugh Dancy)—the body of his last victim gruesomely and meticulously contorted into an origami-like “topiary”—is grotesque enough,…
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Trailer: THE MARTIAN
What’s it about? Based on the best-selling novel by American author Andy Weir (which he self-published in 2011, before it was re-released in 2014), this is the eagerly-anticipated film adaptation. It concerns astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist who becomes stranded on Mars after an accident his crewmates believe he died in. Faced with living on…
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KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2014)
The second Matthew Vaughn film about a group of youngsters taught to develop their skills and harness their potential (after X-Men: First Class), Kingsman: The Secret Service finds the Kick-Ass director adapting another Mark Millar comic—as foundation for a ‘Bond on acid’ adventure that makes Moonraker look like The 39 Steps. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is “Galahad”, a gentleman spy belonging to…
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JURASSIC PARK Saga (1993, 1997, 2001)
To celebrate this weekend’s release of Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World (22 years after Steven Spielberg’s monster hit cinemas), below are retrospective reviews for the original trio of action-adventure films; directed by Steven Spielberg and Joe Johnston, released between 1993 and 2001… Jurassic Park (1993) It’s easy to exaggerate the impact of Jurassic Park back in 1993, but I…
