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DOCTOR WHO, 9.5 – ‘The Girl Who Died’
Maisie Williams isn’t playing Susan, Romana, The Rani, Jenny, or any other returning female time-traveller. There, that’s my review written. Really, that’s nearly everything you need to know beyond the title of this week’s Doctor Who. There’s a fatuous kerfuffle featuring Viking gods from outer space threatening a village of farmers, but it’s just a…
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THE KNICK, 2.1 – ‘Ten Knots’
In its first season, The Knick was a series more interesting than it had any right to be. Set during the turn of the 20th-century at an early New York hospital, the Knickerbocker, it could so easily have been Holby City with period costumes; another soapy medical drama with only a unique setting to differentiate…
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BEASTS OF NO NATION (2015)
Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director, writer, producer and cinematographer of Beasts of No Nation, has an eye for striking images. Which is a good thing because war films rely on them perhaps more so than any other genre. From Paths of Glory (1957) to Apocalypse Now (1979)—two films that Beasts owes a clear debt to—war…
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AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL – ‘Chutes and Ladders’
In the first two (and best) seasons of American Horror Story, there’s a point in the first few episodes where the disparate, seemingly haphazard plot threads come together in a way that brings the season into sharp focus. It’s not that the narrative suddenly coheres—AHS isn’t interested in that—but the thematic connections driving the season begin…
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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…
