Based, rather more loosely than anyone involved has yet admitted, on the classic Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Wolverine miniseries, The Wolverine sees the character summoned to Japan by an old friend, whereupon he becomes embroiled in a war of succession within the Yashida clan. Director James Mangold has melded this plot with some musings on the character’s near-immortality to create a comic book movie that (for the most part) avoids the standard genre tropes and feels more like a Gaijin-in-Japan action movie than yet another superhero blockbuster....

Timeless Season 1, Episode 6 Making up for the previous episode’s stagnation, Timeless lets all the secrets out of the bag with the appropriate backdrop that was the mistrustful Watergate era. Just when the team was becoming closer and learning to rely on each other more and more, trust suddenly enters the picture adding a layer of conflict to the show just when it needed an infusion of fresh angles to pursue....

1.1 Black Blood One of the flaws of this first episode is that it follows the character of Alexander/Paris so closely, and Paris is a total prat. This is not really the show’s fault, as it’s a character trait inherited from Greek mythology. Paris is irresponsible and hot-headed, thinking with entirely the wrong part of his anatomy (political power or military skill are surely more useful attributes than a physically beautiful woman, even considering the fact that, in this version, Paris didn’t know he was a prince at the time)....

Turn Season 3 Episode 2 The latest episode of Turn: Washington’s Spies introduces a new character who promises to be fun to watch. As presaged by an image of the Royal Gazette newspaper added to the show’s opening credits, Turn has brought the New York printer James Rivington onto its stage. In the first two seasons, the show featured Stephen Root as Nathaniel Sackett, Continental Army spy chief. He appeared only occasionally, but he energized every scene he was in....

Veep’s penultimate episode of the season, “Crate” has the series greatest arc. Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) starts off trailing behind the exonerated war torturer Chung and the grunting football manager, Thornhill. “They’re not even sound bites, they’re just sounds,” notes Amy, pegging the competition in the locker room with a swat of a rolled up towel. It ends with Selina Mayer on the – I warned you about spoilers – brink of being the first woman president of America....

4.1 A Good Treason Generally, before a new season of a show I’m reviewing starts, I go back and rewatch the previous season to prepare… to get myself back into the story. I admit that I didn’t do that with Vikings this time. The little one who had the good sense to be born last year just in time to give me maternity leave to write about last season’s Vikings is now a ravaging Viking himself, leaving Mummy little time to do more than is strictly necessary....

While the actor wore the red and blue tights for the final time in 1987 and passed away in 2004, he’s certainly not been forgotten. His likeness has even been used in later Superman comics, particularly those drawn by Gary Frank. This seems to be the perfect time to begin fancasting the next actors to play Batman and Superman. One fan in particular, YouTuber and animator Mike Habjan, has imagined what it would be like to see Reeve as the DCEU’s Superman....

While we bade farewell to the Brockmans at the end of the 2014 series, Hamilton and Jenkin’s début feature, What We Did On Our Holiday, looks for all the world to be re-fitting their dysfunctional family shtick for the big screen. That it actually turns out to be something more unexpected might be worth the price of admission alone. However, fearing that Doug’s ebullient father Gordie (Billy Connolly) might not be long for this life, they take the kids to hang out with their granddad on the occasion of his 75th birthday party....

Along with Sigourney Weaver, this production also had some stand-out performances by Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen, but also a young actress called Carrie Henn, as Rebecca ‘Newt’ Jordan. The soft spoken Carrie was obviously meant for a sparkling movie career, so why did we never see her ever again? Curiously she had no prior acting experience before Aliens, not even a school production performance. The daughter of a US Air Force serviceman, she was at school near Lakenheath when she was unexpectedly cast in the roll of Newt....

The dramedy was the first show produced by basketball God LeBron James’ production label SpringHill Entertainment. That and the fact that it was about (what else?) a basketball player did not speak highly to its potential. A vanity project from a basketball player about a basketball player on a little-watched pay cable channel? Not great, Bob. Survivor’s Remorse was ostensibly about basketball player Cam Calloway’s journey from the streets of Boston to Generic Professional Basketball League (despite James’ involvement, the show did not have access to NBA copyrights) superstardom....

It was, well, cute to see Penny finally take interest in Leonard’s work. She makes a clear attempt to be interested in Leonard’s experiments. Leonard shows her a couple cool experiments and it is really one of the first times that we see Penny genuinely appreciate Leonard as a person. This results in Leonard and Penny not being able to keep their hands off of each other and performing , ahem, “coitis” frequently throughout the episode....

Everyone knows live TV can be a risky business. Just ask John Noakes and that elephant. But of all the usually pre-recorded shows to attempt going out live, 30 Rock‘s Saturday Night Live pedigree was always going to make it lower risk than most. The show’s writers, performers and crew have live broadcasting in their blood, a fact proved by the smooth running of this week’s gaffe-free episode. Filmed in the SNL studios, the live episodes (one story performed twice for East and West coast viewers) enabled 30 Rock‘s writers to include up-to-the-minute gags on the newly rescued Chilean miners and quarterback Brett Favre’s alleged sexts, whilst welcoming back a host of familiar faces....

Or, at least, she did. Moving his friends into her apartment and starring on NBC Dateline for dating under-age girls apparently constitutes suitable grounds for dumping him, despite the fact that her sole redeeming feature is scrubbing up quite nice about once every two episodes. Oh, Liz Lemon. You had the Beeper King but you let him go. Meanwhile, Jack is dating a high-ranking, African-American female in the Bush administration, whose identity remains an ENORMOUS MYSTERY through the whole episode....

Drawing from a well-worn yarn about the price of fame and the anguish of losing it, it is via an unexpected intimacy that Cooper is able to craft something refreshing and unique. Like an acoustic cover of a brassy old standard, he strips away the glitz and bombast to make a passion play that feels raw and unplugged. Garbling his way through a slurring Western drawl, his protagonist Jackson Maine already seems to have one foot in the darkness off-stage right when he accidentally stumbles into a bar after midnight....

In this case, McCall’s next big score is with a New Age nondenomination spiritual guru named Dr. Sinja (Cliff Curtis) who has millions of followers. McCall knows he has a book, and even though McCall never reads more than 10 pages of one, he knows dollar signs are there for the taking. So, Jack pursues Sinja to his ashram, disrupts some pleasant meditation with a brief Michael Jackson interlude, and then, somehow, ends up with a bodhi tree in his backyard....

Afterlife With Archie #1 is written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by the soon-to-be immortal Francesco Francavilla (who seems to be vying for the title of hardest working artist in comics), and it doesn’t look one bit like a “traditional” Archie comic. No, you see, Mr. Francavilla has drawn this comic in his usual moody style, with angles, colors, and shadows that owe more to the classic EC horror titles of the ’50s than the Archie style epitomized by guys like Dan DeCarlo....

The opening of the episode had me fooled a bit as when SHIELD investigates a floating corpse; my Marvel Zombie ass assumed it was the triumphant debut of a fully powered Graviton. That particular Marvel baddie must wait, as the floating dead was caused by a Chituari virus, a welcome little tendril that uncoiled from the Avengers’ Battle of New York. This is more like it, a narrative extension of the cinematic Marvel Universe where the consequences of the events of the films do not stop when the credits roll....

This isn’t to say that “Disrupt” is a particularly exceptional episode. It’s good, but it never even flirts with greatness. There are flashes throughout where it appears that Almost Human is going to do something daring, but it never quite does it. Opening with a couple in their home, dealing with the one year anniversary of the controversial (and accidental) death of a teenager on their property raised my eyebrows....

2.5 Gaslight Gaslight is really about creepy goings on in a hospital where people see things that aren’t real so it makes them do crazy things. It’s a homage to early slasher movies, in an obtuse way. I was fine with this for the first five minutes or more, as the tension was cranked up a little, but after a while it became obvious when someone was having a delusion, and by the time the events were explained they’d flogged the mystery entirely to death....