However, a chance encounter with Gordon ‘Gordo’ Mosley, (Edgerton) a former high school classmate of Simon’s, upsets the status quo. He welcomes them to the neighbourhood with small tokens of friendship and offers to help set up the entertainment system, but soon unnerves Simon with his behaviour. When he eventually draws the line and asks Gordo to leave them alone, Robyn feels caught in the middle of whatever unresolved tension exists between her anxious husband and their overly affable new neighbour....

Cinematic portrayals of extraterrestrial arrivals are nothing new, but it does seem that recently there’s been a hot streak of interest in making new pics that bring outer space organisms down to Terra Firma. This fresh impetus can probably be put down to the success of District 9. Neill Blomkamp’s movie showed that interesting things could be done with the alien invasion narrative without astronomical budgets or star names. Moviemakers sought to spice up the genre by respectively attacking Los Angeles in Skyline (aliens vs....

Yes, let me, because I think you need to hear about them. If you don’t engage with tales of high adventure every so often, you can end up severely deficient in high adventuredom, suffocating in drabness and ultimately experiencing imagination atrophy which will compel you to drown yourself in the kitchen sink. We’ve had the wondrous old-school Spielbergian spectacle of Super 8, and the war story escapades of Captain America: The First Avenger in two terrific films, but the type of adventure I’m talking about hasn’t been visible at the cinema recently....

Stop us if this sounds like we’ve done a find and replace on some other plot summary, but this time we follow Sophia, (Britt Robertson) who’s about to start a prestigious internship at a gallery in New York, just as soon as she finishes studying art at a North Carolina university. But then, she’s dragged to a bull riding contest by her sorority sisters, where she has a meet-cute with handsome championship contender Luke....

The Magicians Season 2 Episode 10 Whether you enjoyed seeing the multiple timeline perception of Dean Fogg, the helpful input of Josh and Todd, or the enjoyable guest appearance by Marlee Matlin, much of the forward motion in this week’s The Magicians came from the intervention of minor characters. Once again, as the various storylines cross over, these details help bind the overall arc into a solid whole. Some deeply touching moments and the promise of important confrontations to come make “The Girl Who Told Time” the best kind of set-up episode....

With The Mechanic, a remake of the 70s Michael Winner-Charles Bronson action-fest, it feels like it’s torn through ten to fifteen pages of screenplay on fast forward. Thus, to give a flavour of what to expect, and to help out the aforementioned latecomer, I thought it best to give an idea of just what he missed. The Mechanic has a cunning plan, you see, to help it get through so much, so quickly....

Thankfully not as cynically terrible as bottom-of-the-barrel doll dross Annabelle, The Nun feels like an odd misstep in a horror franchise that’s otherwise felt very carefully controlled. If this wasn’t a Conjuring Universe movie, we’re not sure it would even get a wide theatrical release at all, and we’re frankly surprised that series creator James Wan gave it the sign off. On the way to the Abbey, which looks like a horror movie Hogwarts, they meet lusty local ‘Frenchie’ (Jonas Bloquet), a French Canadian farmer who delivers supplies to the cloistered sisters and discovered the body, who agrees to act as a guide for the two....

Too late, I realise my refuge is already occupied. An enemy soldier leaps from its cover, firing three deadly shots into my chest. Stricken, my legs give way beneath me. For reasons best known to those with Psychology degrees, we as a society appear to have a collective fascination with war – whether it’s paintball, table-top wargames or a first-person shooter, our appetite for them seems endless. Perhaps it’s a form of morbid curiosity – a desire to experience something that we’ll never go through for real....

A lot has changed in these past four years. Cast members have left, the behind-the-scenes crew has changed and even The Doctor himself has made an appearance. But in 2010 the show faced one of the most significant changes affecting it since its inception: the alteration in mood and tone of Doctor Who itself, under the guidance of new showrunner Steven Moffat. However, The Nightmare Man eschews that formula and, rather than pussy-foot around the changes in tone in the wider Who universe, writer Joe Lidster engages with them head on....

Based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt, there’s little pioneering spirit or old-time black-and-white morality apparent in The Sisters Brothers. Audiard’s Old West is a crude, filthy, mean and often barbaric place, a vast wilderness marked by scattered pockets of, if not civilization, at least the semblance of a society or community. It’s on a symbolic representation of this wasteland–an empty plain on which sits one lonely, tiny ranch–that we meet Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C....

4.10 The Last Stand So where to begin? For the past four years, The Strain has been a capable and consistent horror series. It hasn’t broken into the cultural zeitgeist like The Walking Dead or become as conversation-starting as American Horror Story, but even though it flew under the horror radar a bit, The Strain always delivered compelling and intense storylines and heaped platters of wonderful, wonderful gore. And now, we must bid farewell to our heroes and the strigoi as the final battle with the Master is finally fought as a bunch of broken people save the always-somewhat-broken human race....

Still, you can count on The Thick Of It to call the bluff of your expectations (if you follow me), letting what should have been a serious policy debate get overrun with listeners’ texts about piercing – the best likening it to a robot wearing flesh earrings – and peaking with a producer producing the line of the episode: “I can’t believe my ears, did we just break a story that wasn’t that the Ipswich manager’s got sacked?...

The female voice in Stephen’s head belongs to Cara Coburn (the gorgeous Peyton List), who belongs to a group of “homo-superiors” who dub themselves the Tomorrow People. Before I watched the show, I thought they would be time travelers, a subject I’ve seen explored in Syfy’s Continuum, but this race of people have genes that give them the powers of telepathy, teleporting, and telekinesis. The government knows they exist, and each one that gets captured becomes an Ultra agent, forced to hunt down and neutralize their own kind....

2.21 The Sun Also Rises The second season of the show has relied heavily on said limitations, as the writers can then break out the surprises with little warning or subsequent fan objection. Surprises come thick and fast this week, but some work better than others. We have a full cast, too, with John, Jeremy and Bonnie popping up after an absent couple of weeks. Can’t say we’ve missed them....

5.9 The Cell Another masterstroke was to include Damon in said mystery, and this week went one step further by having him still be directly involved in the present-day goings on. The Cell was essentially a standard flashback episode that served, as always, to introduce a new character and explain their relationship with one or more of the Salvatores – this time Enzo, who was an Augustine prisoner at the same time as Damon and has probably been cooking up his own crazy revenge mission since the 1950s....

This review contains spoilers. Well it seems that the murder of one really does mean the murder of just one as, only a couple of weeks after the original family was joined together, Bonnie helps Klaus split their destinies once again. As with much of this year’s The Vampire Diaries, this renders many previous episodes fairly redundant, but at least we get a tasty new predicament for Elena, Caroline and their favourite vampy brothers to mull over during the show’s spring break....

4.8 Too Far Gone One of the funny things about The Walking Dead as a show is that everyone gets a goodbye speech. When anyone dies, they get to make some big speech or they get some sort of character development, they are pretty quickly added to the show’s growing list of departed cast members (RIP T-Dog). It seemed, albeit briefly, that this season of The Walking Dead might be different....

The Walking Dead Season 7 Episode 3 I’m not sure there’s ever been a more polarizing start to a season of The Walking Dead than the first three episodes of season 7. Even season 6, for all of its problems, delivered three very solid opening episodes full of zombies and Wolves. The common thread that tied those episodes together was the emphasis on action. Big setpieces dominated the early part of the season, a nice breath of fresh air for the fans, who longed to see these characters kicking ass again instead of crashing dinner parties....

1.2 Bad Mans Maybe there just wasn’t room for any jokes. Like last time, there was quite a lot of plot packed into this episode’s thirty minutes. It turns out the heavies who abducted Sam and Phil were working for the mysterious Mr Stevens: he’s involved in some kind of dodgy dealings with the guy on the other end of the phone, and he’s not particularly happy to find that the £800k he needs to buy back his wife has gone missing....

Timeless Season 1, Episode 3 Hitting a more obscure point in history this week was a nice way to introduce the problem of finding the mother ship’s physical location rather than just a time coordinate. Who knew this was even a problem? Jiya’s methodology may be mere technobabble, but it works both for the initial jump and for carrying the mission over into the present, details which were revealed exactly when they needed to be....