Over the past decade, a willingness to compromise has been seen on both sides, and some of these now-established directors have begun to work with state approval. The most prominent is Jia Zhangke, whose features and documentaries have achieved considerable international acclaim. A Touch Of Sin is his latest movie, and while supposedly approved by state censors, its explosive content has meant that Zhangke is still negotiating an official release in mainland China....

“The Girl in the Flower Dress” featured Scorch, a pretty mundane villain with pyrotechnic abilities. A villain named Scorch has appeared in Night Thrasher and Bishop (yes, newbies, Night Thrasher had a comic. He brooded and skateboarded….we’ll tell you about the ’90s sometime), but it doesn’t seem like TV’s Scorch is that dude. Instead, Scorch is a Chinese street magician who uses his powers to entertain the rubes on the streets of Hong Kong....

Fellow comedy casualty The Climb is created by its star Diarra Kilpatrick. Love You More is, likewise, co-developed by its star, Bridget Everett, directed and co-developed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait.

For the most part, it seemed that the main theme of “The Dead” was feeling a sense of belonging. As witches, our heroines are essentially outcasts to the world outside, but there’s more to it then that. Queenie struggles with belonging on account of her race, Delphine with being a woman out of her time, Kyle and Madison with being back from the blackness of death, and Cordelia with the fact that her kin, mother and husband, are far from who they claim to be....

3.5 Burn, Witch, Burn! It’s a beautiful, hilarious, clap-worthy moment handled in spectacular fashion, and it’s one of several gore-based gags that happens in this week’s episode. Having Delphine in the cold opening is usually a clue that something terrible is about to happen—in this case she invents the classic Halloween funhouse gag with peeled grapes as eyeballs, except she just uses eyeballs because peeling grapes is hard—but even Madame LaLaurie’s cruelty is secondary to the impressive amount of splatter in the climactic moments of the A story....

Arrow Season 4, Episode 21 Arrowjust finaggled its nonsensical plot into an action-driven episode with tangible (albeit ridiculously high) stakes and it was totally unexpected. Sure, the flashbacks were dull as ever, but the writing, direction, and humor in most of this episode was Arrowcirca-season 1 or season 2 stuff. Which is to say: really great. The Smoak family has a reunion. This show was great in seasons 1 and 2 in part because of its solid character-driven family drama....

3.1 The Calm Team Arrow is a well-oiled crime fighting machine at this point, with the addition of Roy as back-up hero, Laurel as their aid in the court room and Quentin still acting as their ‘friend on the force’ against doctors orders, all boosting their numbers significantly. Crime rates are down in Starling City, and everyone has been lured into an understandable sense of security. But, as fun as is it is to see the gang winning for a change, we know it can’t last....

Arrow Season 5 Episode 20 I had a complaint in last week’s episode of Arrow that it was completely devoid of the story’s main villain and lacked the trademark action that keeps fans tuning in every week. It turns out that I should have saved that complaint for “Underneath,” which featured even fewer of those key elements. As one may have guessed, the groundwork was laid for a lot of character development and a lot less shooting arrows into bad guys… Zero by my count....

The story goes that, back in 1982, the videogame tie-in was so rushed, and so appallingly received, that Atari was forced to quietly bury millions of unsold cartridges in the New Mexico desert. Within months of the game’s release, Atari had gone from owning an 80 percent share of the videogame market to collapse, and thus, an enduring myth was born: E.T. killed Atari. Penn takes a playful yet quite in-depth approach to his film, intercutting the present-day hunt for the buried cartridges with the story of exactly what happened back in the early 80s – and as is so often the case, the true story behind E....

Attack on Titan Season 3 Episode 3 “In all the books, parents cared about their children…” Eren’s feelings for his parents are particularly complex, as he felt extreme love for his mother, but his father and what lies within his infamous basement could be the entire reason that Eren’s a Titan in the first place. With how this show operates, don’t expect to see any father-son attack teams on the Scouts any time soon....

Sequels are an inevitability when a film does well ($270 million worldwide off an $18 million budget in this case) and point to this as emblematic of a timid, gun-shy Hollywood if you will, but hey: it’s an original property, so count your blessings. And besides, I never saw the first one, so it’s all gravy for me. Maybe this is a valuable experiment in whether a comedy sequel can stand on its own feet without your foreknowledge, or maybe I’m just derelict in my duty, but either way you can judge a comedy without relying on too much nuance: does it make you laugh or not?...

Ballmastrz Episode 5 “Deeter may have gone into that tank, but what came out was more smell than human.” At one point in this episode Gaz tells her team that their attacker preys on two things, “power and fear,” and if they can just stop being afraid then they can do anything. The way that this gets expressed in “Breathe Deep to Win!” is absolutely ridiculous, but the message behind it is still very relevant and important in today’s world....

Bates Motel: Season 4, Episode 6 Early on in “The Vault,” Norma is marveling at her good fortune with her shiny, new husband, comparing their lives to that of a lavish Hollywood movie. Romero grounds things by telling her, “It’s not a movie. Don’t screw it up,” and later on Dylan echoes this thought by telling her to leave things alone with Caleb. And yet Norma keeps picking and picking at the scab of her life until the blood starts running all over the place....

Bates Motel Season 5 Episode 10 Bates Motel isn’t a series that should have worked. A series that digs into the backstory and shines a light on every nook and cranny of famous serial killer and psychotic of the silver screen, Norman Bates, is inherently wrought with issues. And yet, here we are five seasons and 50 episodes later, and I couldn’t be happier that we’ve been allowed to watch this story unfold and reach this glorious end point for the series....

Bates Motel Season 5 Episode 6 Well Marion, it was nice while it lasted. Marion Crane is pretty much the driving force of the narrative this week, much like the episode’s title might indicate, and the bulk of the episode revolves around her. Norman and Marion get a few scenes and plenty of time to get to know one another. The two trade stories and ruminate on love and loneliness where exchanges like this can take place: Highmore vibrates with this material as Norman now seems enlightened and about to enter his final form....

This review contains spoilers. If there is one thing this show manages to do perfectly every single time, it is awkward supernatural dinner parties. Last season there was the classic dinner with Josh’s parents as well as the dinner Josh made for Sally and Aidan that neither of them could eat. And in this episode of Being Human, they finally went for the hat trick with both of our guys inviting over their significant others....

This review contains spoilers. It’s Mark Gatiss! It says something about a show when a very fleeting appearance of a newly-introduced character – albeit played by someone of a hero of mine – stands out as the best thing of the episode. Yes, the brief screen time of Mr Gatiss had me cock-a-hoop, but that’s perhaps partly down to the previous fifty-so minutes leaving me scratching my head. Viewers who haven’t taken to the more comedic elements of this series might have been craving for a bit of high-octane drama and action, but I’m afraid that this satisfied neither camp in which you happen to reside....

1.9 Where The F*** Is Donnie? Money doesn’t exist. That may sound like the opening line of a half-baked anarchist manifesto but it’s also a statement of fact. Money has always been a conceptual creation going back through the trading of goods and services through the era of the gold standard. Now, however, money is more intangible than ever as cash is less abundant and the vast majority of the world’s wealth exists as ones and zeroes on computer screens....

SPOILERS: Clayton is a bigger dumb ass than I originally thought! Instead of having a normal meet and greet with Elena and his family to announce their engagement, Clay brings her to Stonehaven to meet Jeremy [Greg Byrk], then proceeds to exit the room, change, and re-enter the room in wolf form, only to bite Elena’s hand. WHY?! I started this thing praising the writers and creators for finally giving us some answers, but they missed a big one right here: Why did Clay bite her BEFORE telling her what he was?...

1.1 In Other News In 2014’s The Honourable Woman, Blick staged the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a spy thriller. In Black Earth Rising, he frames the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its aftermath as a family drama. This series’ main characters, a leading international prosecutor and her Rwandan-born, genocide-surviving adopted daughter, could hardly be more rarefied, but their relationship offers an accessible route in to the political morass. Michaela Coel plays Kate Ashby, a wryly funny depressive in recovery from a suicide attempt, now working as a legal investigator at her mother’s firm....