Twenty years earlier the main British cinematic attractions were Room at the Top, the first ‘kitchen sink film’, and Hammer’s Dracula with little attention being paid to a modestly budgeted comedy being made by Peter Rogers at Pinewood Studios. The stars of this 6-week wonder were Shirley Eaton, the veteran character actor William Hartnell as the eponymous NCO, and the TV comedian Bob Monkhouse. The picture proved to be a vast commercial hit in the dying days of National Service, but there is little or nothing in Carry On Sergeant to suggest future glories, save for the presence of Kenneth Williams and Connor, Charles Hawtrey and Hattie Jacques some way down the cast list....

To celebrate the organisation’s 75th birthday, 75 figures – both of the film industry and from outside it – were each asked to nominate a movie that they’d like to save for future generations (because presumably some visual media virus is going to break out and in a race against time only a special few will be granted the honour of being preserved for the post- apocalypse population). All things considered though, it’s a surprise though that from such a diverse survey group – made up of directors, actors, writers and politicians – the polled motion pictures are quite a conservative collection....

The idea this time is that the Bad Moms – Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn – each have their own Bad Moms to put up with. Respectively, they get Christine Baranski, Cheryl Hines and Susan Sarandon. Baranski gets to play the overbearing, everything has to be perfect one. Hines is the clingy, living her life through her daughter mother. And Sarandon gets to smoke joints and drink and act like she doesn’t care....

This is A Cure For Wellness, a kind of gothic mystery with generous streaks of Cronenbergian body horror. After several years of expensive tentpole movies for Disney – a flotilla of Pirates Of The Caribbeans, The Lone Ranger – it marks a return to the less action-heavy work he was doing earlier in his career, such as the glossy remake of the J-horror hit, Ring. Lockhart therefore packs a bag and heads to Europe, fully intending to shove his boss in a taxi and head back to Manhattan....

Like any soap opera, Aaaaaaaah! takes in love, infidelity and betrayal – it’s a quintessentially British melodrama, and largely takes place in and around the kind of pleasant terraced house you’d find in any UK city. A housewife, Barbara (former 80s pop sensation Toyah Wilcox) has separated from her husband (played by The Mighty Bush’s Julian Barratt) and has welcomed her new lover, Ryan (Julian Rhind-Tutt) into her home. During a wild party, a man named Smith (Steve Oram) shows up and quickly sweeps Barbara’s daughter (Lucy Honigman) off her feet....

Even some of the finest horror films of recent years have an element of disappointment, for the classic reason that the evil within them is never as horrifying as the one you conceive in your mind. Despite this, it seems that commercial cinema assumes that audiences need a big reveal or they’ll go home unsatisfied; like we won’t be able to sleep at night without a nice, rounded-off conclusion which rationalises what we’ve just seen....

Now, that’s more like it. That’s the kind of stuff fans have been begging for. This week’s Agents of SHIELD essentially serves as Thor 2.5, as fans get to see more of Lady Sif, a major player in the Thor franchise. It’s not a meaningless ratings grab either as Sif’s character actually progresses during the course of her battle with her Asgardian rival, Lorelei. Jamie Alexander’s screen presence as Sif is not in any way diminished by the small screen....

Rickman worked with Alison Deegan, Barry’s wife, on the screenplay for his final film as director, A Little Chaos. It was a project that the pair worked on for 17 years, and in that time, Barry and Rickman became firm friends too. During that time, Rickman passed on his advice for how to handle the moment of an awards ceremony when your category came up. “Alan won his share and lost his share,” Barry recalled, and Rickman’s method was “to start to clap low down, about a foot off the ground, between your knees, and then as the announcement is made, slowly raise your hands in the clapping mechanism, so you won’t be revealed to be distraught or anything when the cameras are on you!...

What is outside of the parameters of Holmes’ world is the 2007-08 financial crisis, which forms the backdrop for All We Had. At the start of the film, Rita and Ruthie have fled another shady boyfriend (“my mother was better at loving men than choosing them,” Ruthie intones in voiceover) and bills they just can’t pay. Running on fumes—figuratively and literally, in their battered car—they attempt to dine-and-ditch at a local diner on the road, only to have their car break down in front of their marks....

American Dad Season 15 Episode 12 Review A lot of the time American Dad chooses to have fun with the wilder and more outrageous aspects of Roger’s alien genealogy. If you have an alien on your show where you’re allowed to basically rewrite the rules on their limitations, then why wouldn’t you take advantage of that? So while some episodes of the series get mileage out of Roger’s resistance to violence or his unique anatomy, “OreTron Trail” instead decides to mix things up and go for the heartstrings....

4.8 Blood Bath When Jimmy and the gang recover Ma Petite’s bloody, shredded clothing after a cold opening of Gloria speaking to her faceless therapist, Elsa Mars is in fine form. She’s sobbing, she’s grasping at the mangled dress, she’s staring at a complete emotional breakdown. Everyone’s pulled in almost immediately by this, except for Ethel, who knows better. Later on in the episode, when Ethel’s body is discovered after she’s decapitated during a suspicious car crash suicide that’s way too well plotted out to have been conducted by someone like Ethel, Elsa has another huge emotional breakdown, dropping to her knees at the crash scene and wailing in German to the heavens about Ethel and how she’s lost her best friend and all that stuff....

1.11 Battle Royale Christine Estabrook’s Marcie and Matt Ross’s Dr. Charles Montgomery were surprise visitors, but welcome ones. However, the other modern era tale of American Horror Story, Coven, has been strangely absent. Until this episode, of course. Liz and Iris left off with a hail of gunfire, storming into Countess’s penthouse like Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction. They kill an unintended target, poor Donovan, and severely injure the one they need to take care of, Countess....

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with “The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak.” We could have gotten too bogged down in the past. Too much weight could have been given to some “dark secret” of Felicity’s. These things didn’t happen. What we got was a fun, charming episode of Arrow that still managed to not feel too lightweight. One of my pet hates on television is the practice I call “magic hacking” where keyboards sub for magic wands, I tend to excuse it on Arrow....

Where do you start after an episode like that? Busting a drug dealer on a construction site, Gene and the rest of the team find a buried body encrusted in concrete, leading to a murder investigation involving a dodgy site manager, Polish labourers and a police officer who should prove very familiar to viewers of the series. It’s hard to review this episode without giving away too many spoilers. Again, we repeat: for those who have yet to see the episode stop reading now… really, it will spoil things too much if you carry on....

3.9 Even God Doesn’t Know What To Make Of You Banshee season three has been such an embarrassment of riches that when an episode falls a little flat, it stands out. In the weeks so far we have had the siege, the Burton/Nola fight, the heist at Camp Genoa, Chayton and Hood’s showdown and many more immediately iconic moments on a week to week basis. An episode that lacks such a moment but still manages to balance action, heart and a killer cliffhanger would be a top-notch hour in any other show; but this is Banshee, and we have been so spoilt this year that it was hard not to be a little let down as the show devoted itself primarily to putting things in place for the big finale....

This review contains spoilers. Staring was the big story in last week’s deliberate and measured opener for the BBC’s new adaptation of Birdsong. Characters stared longingly, lustily, they stared into the past, stared at the devastation war brings. We stared back at their perfect faces, plump lips and cupid’s bows. Everyone was beautiful, and everyone was in pain. It was like a Gucci ad for the horrors of war. The staring continued in part two, as did the pain....

DoG: The obvious question – why sheep? Did you have a bad experience with a sheep at any point in your life? D’you think there are any other farmyard animals who are ripe for a horror movie makeover? JK: Why sheep? Because that’s always been pretty much New Zealand’s only claim to fame (besides the All Blacks and Lord of the Rings — and there’s already a film of the latter and I certainly wasn’t going to make a film about the former!...