Warning: this review contains spoilers. “Let me make things right” says Jimmy Darmody during the seaso two finale of Boardwalk Empire, “or as right as they can be”. The latter is all he can really hope for, everything seems to have slipped from his grasp, and he knows better than anyone else that he is now in his own personal denouement. Time to clean things up. Appropriate then, that the second season ends as it started, with a bloody shootout involving the Ku Klux Klan....

4.7 William Wilson The best of the crop do it well. Breaking Bad synthesised Whitman and Shelley, The Wire tapped Fitzgerald and Dickens while The Sopranos dined out on Tolstoy and Flaubert. Two weeks ago, Boardwalk Empire gave us Goethe. Tonight, we go Poe. William Wilson, his 1839 story from which this episode takes its title, is the dark tale of a selfish and dissolute young man who encounters a schoolfellow with the same name and a curiously similar appearance....

5.1 Golden Days for Boys and Girls With a firm hand at the tiller, it could easily have seen out the 1920s over three or four additional seasons. Following Prohibition from enactment to repeal might have required the occasional skip or fast forward but the pace of history and certain key events, among them Arnold Rothstein’s murder, Al Capone’s blood-soaked rise to dominance, Charlie Luciano’s deft navigation of the Italian-American underworld and the Crash of 1929, would have played out in suitably dramatic fashion....

No, that would be scary and creepy. What I’d like is a weekly science and technology show that showcases what’s happening around the world. Is that too much to ask, or is the budget for endless costume dramas and Jonathon Ross at the BBC consuming their entire budget? Obviously in retrospect 98% of it was completely bunk, but it was a curious entertainment of sorts. Retrospectively much of it appears to be a PR campaign to convince the general public that mad scientists were ‘nice’ or mostly harmless, rather than the architects of our ultimate destruction....

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Episode 5 On paper Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card should not work. It’s filled with long drawn out scenes that barely contribute to the overall narrative. Do we need a six-minute scene of Sakura making food for her picnic and talking to her family? No, the only bit of important information there is that Yukito hasn’t been eating as much. But the more I watch this show the more I realize it doesn’t care about having a tightly focused plot or advancing any story arcs....

7.4 Child’s Play & 7.5 Meme Is Murder Of all the adjectives I can think of that might be used to describe a television series, the one I would most shy away from with Castle is “consistent.” The show is fun—most of the time. Formulaic—sometimes. Inventive—on occasion. Inspired—once in a while. But unfortunately, good or bad, it’s none of these things consistently. Last week’s Child’s Play and this week’s Meme Is Murder are effective examples of this....

8.12 Blame Game For those of you who haven’t seen it, Cube is about a group of strangers who wake up in a fairly featureless room alone with a small portal in each of the walls. Through each of the portals is another room just like the one they are in, except that that room may be equipped with a deadly trap, some of which can be outwitted, almost all of which can be avoided if you’re smart enough....

5.9 Chuck Versus The Kept Man This story is mostly about the animal attraction that Gertrude Verbinski has for Casey, and how that tends to drag the whole team into hot water. It wasn’t a great story, but they managed to put a few elements in here that made me chuckle. Chuck’s entirely wacky idea that they should become the ‘Spies who Care’, was a nice theme that was woven throughout, as was a sub-plot about Sarah supposedly falling pregnant....

That was beautiful. Disgusting, yes—those gristly, glistening, alien umbilical cords were truly horrid—but beautiful too, in its performances and treatment of grief. Nightvisiting announced itself as an emotional episode with a dialogue-free opening montage that smoothly told the story of Tanya’s parents meeting, marrying and raising their family, followed by the awful morning dad Jasper’s corpse was carried out of the house by paramedics. The idea of something that wants to harm you disguising itself as a lost loved one is a cruelly brilliant concept....

This review contains spoilers. She does everything she can to track down a still-missing Georgia, and when she does – having sex in her dorm room – there’s barely a batted eyelid. Because we’re watching a television programme that promises to fit into the psychological thriller genre, we’re expecting things to unravel in a fairly sinister way, but to the characters this seems like a pretty standard suicide. If suicides can ever be standard, that is....

Colony Season 2 Episode 5 After visiting Hitchcockian territory last week, Colony returns to its novel-esque storytelling scope in “Company Man,” a highly functional middle season episode that gives all the stray arcs running around the show’s landscape time to breathe or boil, depending on which one we’re speaking of. It also lets these loose ends congeal together to form new and improved story arcs that make the folks at home say “Aha, so that’s what they’re doing… maybe?...

The showrunners of Constantine couldn’t have known it when they filmed “Rage of Caliban,” but this episode marked a very important broadcast for the series. This was the first episode since NBC announced that the show would cease production and be limited to thirteen episodes. Ratings have been low during the initial broadcast, but the series shows promise in later viewings via DVR and streaming so the remaining episodes will tell the tale whether we will be treated to the adventures of Constantine, Zed, and Chas next year....

1.5 Danse Voudou First, let’s get the big news out of the way: Constantine smokes in this episode. Not sneaky “I was smoking off camera” stuff, but actual lit-cigarette-in-the-mouth action. I’m not sure how that happened after all the brouhaha about not smoking on network television, but I’m not going to question it. It’s the last piece of the perfect live-action Constantine portrayal, and that’s reason to celebrate. Dare we dream that this is preparing us for Dangerous Habits?...

Kellogg goes to talk to Sonia, and Lucas has a little hallucination. Maybe from all his pain pills? And by the way, Kiera nailed Garza with her awesome tech. The police chief actually gives Kiera authority to do what she needs to do, no camera, nothing. The problem is, Garza enjoys the pain. Kiera needs to think for herself, but Travis is looking for his partner. Alec is able to track him down, bringing Travis to his knees…but Kiera gets distracted by an unruly mob....

Well, you can’t have an Incan Temple story without cunning deathtraps and this episode has them in spades. It’s quite a diverse crew that must find ways to survive these traps, Da Vinci with his analytical mind, Riario with his unwavering faith, and Zoroaster with his base cunning. Da Vinci’s Demons is rarely predictable, but impractical Incan deathtraps are quite the uncharacteristic cliché for this show. The Indiana Jones riff is paint by numbers at best....

At the heart of the sequel, more than ever, is Ryan Reynolds in the title role, joyfully spitting out lines that take aim at the box office take of The Passion Of The Christ, saving the world, and looking to start a family with Vanessa, played again by the terrific Morena Baccarin. It’s hard not, in the very early stages too, to feel like you’re in safe hands. Sure, the directorial baton has passed from Tim Miller (who exited over creative differences) to John Wick co-director David Leitch, but at first it feels like the film has extended the marketing campaign, and very much captured its tone....

Death Wish, which is both adapted from Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel and remakes the 1974 film starring Charles Bronson, is an ugly film for ugly people. It’s made by a director, Eli Roth, whose entire career has been based on fear of the Other: fear of foreign countries (Hostel and its sequel), fear of women (Knock Knock), and fear of people different from us (The Green Inferno). While the novel Death Wish was a warning against vigilante justice and the 1974 film made a few token stabs in that direction, Roth’s film revels in it and clearly paints Paul Kersey, the surgeon turned vigilante now played by Bruce Willis, as some sort of superhero worthy of our applause and respect....

Here’s what we know about the Ice Truck Killer thus far: he kills women. He’s definitely killed at least one prostitute. When the bodies are discovered, they’re dismembered, cut into sections with almost surgical skill, and about half of them have been wrapped up with plastic. On some of the bodies, there’s been some cell crystallisation, which is how we know he has an ice truck, hence the pseudonym. Even though he didn’t do that until quite late in the game, but never mind....

In the final moments of Doctor Foster series one, as Simon and a heavily pregnant Kate drove away from Parminster town square, Gemma glanced over at the gaming magazine Tom was reading and saw he was looking at a female character leaning provocatively over a car bonnet in a bikini. Nothing further was said, but it planted a seed in her and our minds about Tom’s developing attitudes to relationships and sex....

But as on so many occasions, Michael Grade was wrong: 1980s Who was not stuck in a timewarp – the problem is it was too up to date. But oddly, that wasn’t my view at the time. Like a lot of Who fans, I’d been angry at the show’s 1985 suspension, confused by Colin Baker’s ‘Trial’ season, and then shocked to hear that Mr Baker had been sacked. So it was with a lot of trepidation that I sat down to watch Time and the Rani in September 1987....