Wank bullets (I just can’t mention them enough in this review) played such a crucial role in this episode as they formed the basis of a long set-up to the killer punchline within the final minutes. Put together Jeremy’s rather heartening desire to not let his mate down (brought about because of an argument between the pair earlier when Mark questioned Jez’s loyalty to him), Mark’s first stab at trying to gain a job that would make him happy, and the obligatory misreading of a situation and you have the ingredients for a hilarious set piece....

Other, more measured thrillers and horror films do something else: they fail to provide those release valve moments, meaning the tension simply builds and builds for 100 or so minutes. Personal Shopper is one of those movies. If Maureen seems lonely and detached, there’s a good reason for that: her brother died one year earlier of a heart attack – and Maureen shares the same inherited defect which means she could also meet the same fate....

The film is fighting against a tide of bad will generated by what came before it, as well as a film landscape far more saturated with visually spectacular, family-friendly adventure films than that of 2003, but somehow Salazar’s Revenge has risen to the challenge to become the best Pirates film since Black Pearl. Meanwhile, Henry Turner (Brenton Thwaites) is searching for a way to free his father from Davy Jones’ curse, and plucky astronomer Carina (Kaya Scodelario) has been arrested for witchcraft after trying to uncover the secret of her origins with science....

Part drama, part whimsical comedy, Please Stand By is a warm and empathetic look at a person coming to terms with what makes her different and gaining strength from that. It’s also an affectionate ode to the power of Star Trek, fans and imagination, with several scenes designed to look like they’re taken right from the old series. The movie was directed by Ben Lewin, the Australian filmmaker whose well-received The Sessions (2013) was also about a person dealing in an unusual way with a disability (Lewin, who contracted polio when he was six and uses crutches to walk, knows a little about this)....

The new Poltergeist is, of course, anything but. This is a digital film, both in practicality and in theme. And it takes place in a digital world, from the the very first moments, when an intense close-up of LCD pixels floats in the 3D the space behind the screen, right through to the big centrepiece battle, with its employment of IR cameras, GPS tracking and a flying drone. Despite the focus on a family of characters and their relationships, the Poltergeist attacks seem every bit as external in this film as they did in the original....

In “Interim Mayor” Roseanne guest stars as Portland’s new interim mayor in the wake of the scandal that rocked the city in last week’s episode. To no one’s surprise, Portland fills its city government positions with a Temp Agency and Roseanne is available to step in when she gets the call. There are only a select few who are capable of handing a city as diverse as Portland and as Rosanne notices, the city isn’t quite what she expected....

In reviewing this episode, one has to look at it from one of two sides. You can choose to look at it as a die hard fan who follows PR news and Japanese seasons very closely. Invites were sent out to a ton of former Ranger actors and they only picked a handful (and apparently paid them very little). They had a mountain of footage from the Japanese season Gokaiger to use (can’t wait to hear for the next five years they should have used the MMPR Red with shield footage)....

Power Rangers Super Ninja Steel Episode 13 I am in awe. Farce: noun. a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations. I mean that says it all, doesn’t it? Let’s run down what happens. The team is given another “harder” test the next day and to get out of it Victor and Monty eat a ton of beans. Okay, sure. Fart jokes are a (not funny) thing in Ninja Steel....

Preacher Season 3 Episode 6 If this episode of Preacher has taught me anything, it’s this: Why smile when you can smirk? And, along those same lines, why just make your audience laugh when you can make them cry, too? It’s not often Preacher—a show that has literally been to Hell and back, a show that last season transformed Adolf Hitler into a sympathetic character—so boldly goes for the heartstrings. When it comes to Eugene Root, the show often drops the snark in favor of the more tragic aspects of his existence....

4.19 Shadow Play I said at the end of my Pretty Little Liars review last week that this episode, Shadow Play, would either be a colossal waste of our time or something unexpectedly great. Well, while I wouldn’t put it anywhere near my top ten, this little film noir experiment really wasn’t as terrible as it could have been. Sure, some actors committed to the theme more than others, and some pulled it off better than others, but it was a great demonstration of how to do a novelty episode without forgetting about the matter at hand....

6.14 New Guys, New Lies & 6.16 Do Not Disturb They also appear to be one step behind in a way their predecessors never were, with the Liars’ efforts to turn things around on their new tormentor actually appearing to work. Yes, Caleb is a whiz on the computer and has probably picked up a few extra tricks in the last five years, but surely it shouldn’t be that easy to hack into A’s computer?...

Resurrection, which is shot very sharply by director Charles McDougall, jumps starts with an eight-year-old boy, Jacob, awaking in a rice paddy in China. The anomaly of the boy’s appearance, without identification, passport, or any record of his existence, gets immigration agent Marty Bellamy involved. Bellamy is portrayed by Omar Epps, last seen on TV on Fox’s House. Epps isn’t given much to do except seem perplexed, but he seems fine enough as the show’s lead, though he does spout off a few eye rolling attempts at one-liners....

Better, Lost, better. It’s almost as if you can sniff the end-of-season finale episodes coming, and realise you’ve got a couple of episodes to get us interested again. So out, as they did last year, come all the stops to try and wipe from our minds the 15 or so episodes of tedium that preceded all of this. For starters, the flashback segment was relevant, interesting and genuinely added both to the understanding of a character and the plot of the show....

The task this week involved advertising, and coming up with a brand name and campaign for a pair of trainers. There’s little surprise in the tasks after three series of the UK Apprentice and six of the American version, but nonetheless it offered enough of a platform to observe the remaining contenders scrabbling to be sacked by Alan Sugar eight months into the job. This episode also sowed the seeds for Naomi’s eventually departure....

1.24 The Erlenmeyer Flask We start our episode with a car chase and a bit of police brutality, always an exciting intro. The suspect is shot on his way into the bay, leaving behind a trail of what appears to be green blood. A stream of law enforcement agencies come in to help look for the injured man, now presumed dead. It is in this atmosphere that Mulder is put onto the case by Deep Throat, and after having a fruitless conversation with the officer in charge of the scene, our team is directed to the impound where the suspect/victim’s car was taken....

Sailor Moon follows Endymion through the portal, but the other senshi cannot, so they take the long way to the Dark Kingdom’s entrance, which is located all the way up at the North Pole. On their way in, they encounter the Shitenou. Things look touch and go for a moment, but they manage to reawaken their past loves’ true selves. The reunion is short-lived, because a pissed off Queen Metalia, having no further use for the Shitenou, blows them up right in front of the senshi’s eyes....

The episode kicks off interestingly enough here. After messing up big on a case (which seems to have entailed the grand crime of setting a car on fire) the gang is forced to undergo psychological testing which is used more of a framing device than a piece of intellectual science. The team is then conveniently put in the position of recounting the past 24 hours, which we get told to us in a fragmented perspective through the members of the team....

It’s perhaps a little inevitable that after the standard-setting opening episode of Sherlock last week, that the second instalment should not quite manage to match it. Yet, despite lacking just a bit of the wit and sparkle that was sprinkled throughout A Study In Pink, The Blind Banker nonetheless delivered another 90 minutes of genuine entertainment, the ilk of which we’ve not been used to getting on Sunday nights. And it’s already got me looking forward to many more Sherlock adventures in the years ahead....

In many original series stories they found strangely distorted versions of Earth, spread through the galaxy like relatives you never knew about. Searching the ruined city, or really the redressed sets from the The Andy Griffith Show, they discover feral children and a horribly mutated and aged adult who soon dies. Soon it becomes apparent that the adult population has died off 300 years ago, leaving only pre-pubescent children to fend for themselves....

Given that modern day blockbusters like to burst out of the traps with something really rather special to get us sitting up and taking notice, it’s something of a surprise that Star Trek Into Darkness‘ weakest sequence is the one that opens it. Here, we find the crew of the rebooted USS Enterprise on a volcanic alien planet, whose inhabitants are, to put it mildly, not the ones to go to when your computer doesn’t work....