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For Your Reconsideration: Vince Vaughn
You don’t worry about being liked. You have to be yourself. —Vince Vaughn He could probably have been a wrestler; this towering, half-handsome hunk with a propensity for cheap pops and high fives. He could probably be a footballer; this frat brat with wardrobe structure. He might have been a bartender; with his strawberry lips…
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TRUE DETECTIVE, 2.1 – ‘The Western Book of the Dead’
Hello everyone, and welcome to the second season of True Detective (a.k.a the one where Nic Pizzolatto tries to pre-empt his critics by having his cast make weighty pronouncements, that apply to us as much as to the plot, every few minutes.) If that sounds like I disliked the opening episode of last year’s most-hyped show, then…
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HUMANS – series one, episode two
With its second instalment, Humans consolidates its position as television’s premier slice of intelligent science fiction, and continues to intrigue and unsettle. Even after two episodes it’s perfectly clear that Humans is at its best when it focuses in on the household lives of these characters, their relationships, and the dynamics they share with their various…
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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,…
