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CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (2016)
Marvel films have gone big before. They’ve launched an alien invasion onto New York for The Avengers, seen half of London uprooted in Thor: The Dark World, and sent an entire city very literally crashing to the ground in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But they’ve never gone bigger than this. That’s not to say Captain…
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VINYL, 1.10 – ‘Alibi’
The final episode of Vinyl’s first season was also the last to be written by co-creator Terence Winter, who will be replaced for the second season by Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) and Max Borenstein (Godzilla)—neither of whom have ever helmed a television series. It would be nice to say that the likeable and…
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OUTLANDER, 2.2 – ‘Not in Scotland Anymore’
And so, rather like The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, Outlander’s Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) find themselves over the English Channel, acclimatising to the profoundly different world of 18th-century France. However, while the cultivation of several vivid social connections dominates Ira Steven Behr’s “Not in Scotland Anymore”, the episode also spends some…
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BETTER CALL SAUL, 2.10 – ‘Klick’
It’s a little miracle that Better Call Saul can deliver such a fantastic season finale, without the need for anything particularly earth-shattering to happen. Events are just allowed to unfold in a very plausible way, and we’re now so invested in the core relationships that the tiniest of things can cause a great deal of…
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HAP AND LEONARD – Season One
Hap and Leonard, the latest US crime series to find its way to Amazon Video in the UK, is something of an odd beast. Adapted from Joe R. Lansdale’s best-selling novels, by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle, who also worked on the excellent Lansdale adaptation Cold in July, and with a top-notch cast headed up…
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HUSH (2016)
A fleeting glance of Hush while browsing Netflix and you’d be forgiven for having a reflexive urge to keep scrolling. ‘A young woman living alone in the woods is terrorised by a masked serial killer’—sound familiar? However, while this horror film has its flaws, if you look past the tropes and bargain bin poster you’ll…
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THE AMERICANS, 4.5 – ‘Clark’s Place’
After the shocking ending of last week’s episode, “Clark’s Place” was an episode for The Americans to do its customary thing, after a major story development, of bringing things back down to a slow burn. None of the show’s storylines are advanced very much; instead, lots of time is devoted to subtle character beats and ratcheting…
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THE JUNGLE BOOK (2016)
It’s easy to condemn Disney for adapting its animations into live-action, as it seems like a creatively bankrupt endeavour, but the success of 2015’s Cinderella provided reason to hope it’s less cynical than it seems. Thankfully, Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book continues what could be a successful trend from the studio, as his film finds…
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OUTLANDER, 2.1 – ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’
Readers of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels were in for a bit of a surprise this week with the broadcast of “Through A Glass, Darkly”, season 2’s opener of Starz’s adaptation of the historical fantasy drama. In Gabaldon’s second novel, Dragonfly in Amber, nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe)—holidaying in the Scotland of 1945 and whisked away to the Jacobite…
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VINYL, 1.8-9 – ‘E.A.B’ & ‘Rock & Roll Queen’
I don’t know whether I’m suffering from full-blown Stockholm system, or whether Vinyl has improved tremendously over the course of its run, but I genuinely enjoyed the two latest episodes. “E.A.B” and “Rock and Roll Queen” were a strong mix of the better parts of the music plot lines (the fact that American Century isn’t…
