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UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT – Season One
The Office‘s Ellie Kemper is utterly fantastic in Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, playing the eponymous heroine rescued from a doomsday cult, having spent fifteen years living in an underground bunker with three other ladies, later dubbed ‘The Indiana Mole Women’ by the media. Kimmy’s an incredibly naïve but optimistic woman, with a persistently upbeat attitude and…
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Trailer – MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION
What is this one about? The fifth entry in the 20-year-old action thriller franchise finds the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) being dissolved just as an “anti-IMF” rival organisation called The Syndicate reveal themselves. Isn’t that always the way? Who’s sitting in the director’s chair? Adding a M:I film to his resume, after Brian De Palma,…
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Trailer – CRIMSON PEAK
What’s it about? Guillermo del Toro has so many projects stuck in the pipeline (including dozens that are swirling around his fertile imagination) that it almost feels strange when one comes to fruition. Crimson Peak is the Mexican director’s next movie; a supernatural thriller about a young author called Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) who goes to…
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STOKER (2013)
Park Chan-wook’s Stoker is a film with a curious DNA. Directed by the man who brought South Korean cinema to the masses with his highly regarded and highly influential ‘Vengeance Trilogy’, Stoker is his first English language film. The script and story, which owe a heavy debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, were it written by Wentworth Miller. Yes,…
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Trailer – ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING
What’s it about? An ordinary school teacher Neil Clarke (Simon Pegg) is given omnipotent powers by a group of extra-terrestrials (voiced by the Monty Python troupe) planning to demolish Earth, meaning he can do “absolutely anything”. Now the fate of the world rests on Neil using his abilities responsibly. Not, um, wishing himself a more muscular physique, ordering…
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SHERLOCK HOLMES (BBC, 1965-68)
In the pantheon of celebrated Sherlock Holmes adaptations there is one BBC television series that tends to get overlooked. In 1965 the BBC produced a series of faithful adaptations of 13 Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories starring Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock. The series is perhaps unfairly eclipsed by the colour series made by the…
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Drama & Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert
If you’re expecting some huge revelations about Verity Lambert’s tenure as producer of Doctor Who in Richard Marson’s new book Drama and Delight: The Life and Legacy of Verity Lambert then you’ll probably be disappointed. As the author emphatically declares, Verity Lambert was so much more than the first producer of the legendary science fiction series,…
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FURIOUS 7 (2015)
The Fast & Furious franchise gets so much right that it’s easy to ignore the things that are less appealing about it. It is sometimes morally questionable/reckless and each film seems to need to feature at least three scenes of scantily-clad/objectified women. But it’s also a oddly touching series about family and loyalty, and it’s essentially too…
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INHERENT VICE (2014)
I’m not sure exactly where to begin with Inherent Vice—I’ve seen it twice now, and I haven’t completely wrapped my head around it, but I know it’s a movie I’ll be returning to for the rest of my life. It’s not a problem of not understanding the plot, as the mystery at the centre of Inherent Vice, while…
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AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (2015)
If the box-office supremacy of The Avengers can be partly attributed to the simple mathematics of four established superheroes appearing in the same film, with lashings of tongue-in-cheek humour and more digital bedlam than the team’s previous solo outings combined, highly-anticipated follow-up Avengers: Age of Ultron has a far tougher job on its hands. If the original succeeded with…
