Burton and Taylor is an intimate new feature-length drama from BBC4, focusing on one of Hollywood’s most (in)famous love affairs, that between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The film traces the story of the last time the two worked together, on a critically lambasted theatrical tour of Noël Coward’s play Private Lives, as they remember and reassess their relationship. There’s a moment when, following some disastrous rehearsals, Bonham Carter slinks onto the live stage for the opening night and suddenly she is Taylor, reminding all of us that what we saw on screen was not who these people really were, but what they projected of themselves for us....

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Episode 1 If you’re a hardcore fan of Cardcaptor Sakura, this new series has everything you could want. The continuation of the final scene from the manga. Tomoyo’s stock of costumes ready to go. Yukito and Toya being gay as hell. The first half of the episode was handled just fine and was the exact right time to play the old cards as it were. Sakura is still getting teased by Toya and she still sucks at school....

6.11 Under Fire But each does fulfill a specific purpose. The flashback episode is largely driven by a not-even-thinly hidden motive: it’s simply cheaper to make an episode where the majority of the material is recycled from other episodes. It has the side benefit of luring in new viewers who were channel surfing by showing them an episode made of almost nothing but the best moments. The trapped-and-about-to-die episode, on the other hand, is a touch more complicated....

7.17 Hong Kong Hustle One of the really good things about the show is Kate Beckett. In the first season, the show’s premise all but required that her character be a stereotype that we’ve seen again and again on television: the tough-as-nails female cop who has had to be better than the men around her and who, as a result, has developed a virtually impervious, no-nonsense shell (that exists largely so the male lead can be seen as valiant by breaking through it)....

7.23 Hollander’s Woods But trailers and previews aren’t the only things that can “spoil” a story. Sometimes, it’s not what the actors do on-screen that gives stuff away, but what they do off of it that broadcasts where a story will go. After all, if Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher sign on to do the next Star Wars movie, no one will be surprised if Han Solo and Leia Organa show up at some point in the film, right?...

7.1 Driven & 7.2 Montreal The unnecessary romantic setback that ended last season was compounded last week by the sudden appearance of yet another relationship obstacle in Driven. In that episode, we learn that Castle is not in the crashed and burning car that both we and Kate see in the last moment of last season’s final cliffhanger. Instead, it first appears that he’s been kidnapped, but as Beckett and the boys soon discover, it looks as though Castle is complicit in, and perhaps even arranged, the supposed kidnapping....

8.4 What Lies Beneath… The first is a great case. Because this is Castle, however, what we mean by “great” is a little different than you might expect on some other shows. Castle will never win any (important) awards for its storytelling. As I have repeatedly suggested, the writers seem to do their brainstorming while reading the TV Tropes page: even Castle’s best stories are usually nothing more than one overused story idea after another strung together to make a somewhat cohesive whole....

It would be accurate to say I’ve not been enamoured with Chuck so far this year. It just doesn’t seem to have the zip it had in the excellent season 2, and some of the changes have brought their own problems, such as the overly useful intersect 2.0. I’m, therefore, not going to say that Operation Awesome is a return to form, but it was certainly a step in the right direction....

In that 14 years, though, it’s a game series that’s had its fair share of bumps, and the release of CODumentary – essentially a fan-made, unofficial exploration of the franchise – is a welcome one. It’s from writer-director Jonathan Beales, and his film has the aim of exploring just how the game went from modest beginnings to the cashcow it now is. At its very best, CODumentary does just that, its unofficial status allowing it to address moments in the series’ history that a varnished, officially-approached take on the story would surely gloss over....

Colony Season 2 Episode 8 After spending the past couple of weeks setting up and processing all of its major storylines, Colony strikes back with a return to form that’s stunning, chilling, and touching all in the same breath. I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but like most other episodes of this series, “Good Intentions” is a breathtaking hour of television, one that raises the stakes and changes several of the games it’s been playing with us this season....

Quiet at the back! Welcome to Death 101. Feel the fear and eat the doughnut anyway. And do try and ignore the mud wrestling women. You’ll only encourage them. Kicking off with the shock revelation that Pierce still lives with his mother, oh, and that Troy found her dead in the garage, the episode forces Jeff to confront his mortality, something he apparently skipped as a teenager, and the fact that eating doughnuts and ice cream is infinitely preferable to living forever....

I made a comment last season about Garza asking a captive Alec if she looked pretty, and how stupid I thought that was. Right off the bat, this episode reveals that she was his hooker in 2077, where he said, “You look very pretty tonight.” And who is providing security for their rendezvous? None other than Kiera. Wow. Back in 2013, Alec has reservations about reactivating the CMR of Kiera’s dead partner, Elena, but suddenly it sounds pretty cool, so he does....

Does the idea that the “body” is a wax replica of an actual dead person give you the creeps? The main plot involves an effort by Blackbeard’s emissaries, Lowe, Nenna, and Charlie, to copy a map held by the Spanish. I liked the sneaking around, the lavish Spanish set, the cloak and dagger (quite literally). And I like Nenna very much. She’s a woman, she’s black, and she’s a pirate....

1.4 The Magician I’m not sure if sunglasses were a thing in Italy in 1476, but the pseudo-pork pie hat is a very nice touch. Those little touches, along with things like a syringe well before syringes were common and Leonardo’s more outlandish experiments, are kind of beneficial to the show because it changes it from a historical drama to the more fantastical historical fiction that Da Vinci’s Demons is trying to be....

Gallaher and Ellis’s new book, The Only Living Boy, out this week from Papercutz, tells the story of Erik, a young boy who stumbles into Central Park one rainy night and wakes up in a patchwork fantasy Manhattan ruled by a giant dragon with only his teddy bear backpack, Bear, to connect him to who he was before he awoke. He sat down with Den of Geek to talk about the new book, his working relationship with Ellis, and how his time as a special education teacher in New York City helped spawn The Only Living Boy....

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” the official site reminds us, and FBI Profiler Candice DeLong Faces Evil on an almost daily basis, without blinking. Over the past 22 years, the internationally recognized homicide expert has been the good face on some of the FBI’s most headlining cases. She helped bottle up the Tylenol murders and issue the final manifesto on the Unabomber case. Beyond profiling, she even went undercover as a mob moll, according to her best-selling memoir, SPECIAL AGENT: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI....

Needless to say it should be overbearingly bleak, but that tension turns into hysteria on a dime when Reynolds cracks, “So dark. Are you sure you’re not from the DC Universe?” It’s a pitch perfect punchline, showcasing again Deadpool’s ability to break the fourth-wall and wink at an audience. An audience who, unlike all other goody two-shoes in capes and cowls, Deadpool knows is watching. In fact, he has a lot of fun at DC (or rather Warner Brothers’ DC Extended Universe) and Marvel Studios’ expense throughout the picture in many one-liners too amusing to give away....

Ambrose was re-introduced to WWE by Rollins, his former Shield teammate, and this Sunday Ambrose will be in Rollins’ corner when he challenges Dolph Ziggler for the Intercontinental Title. Ziggler, of course, will have the massive Drew Galloway in his corner. Ambrose’s return couldn’t have come at a better time for WWE, as they’re just a few weeks away from going up against the NFL and Monday Night Football on a weekly basis....

When the original Destiny dropped in 2014, fans immediately started talking about advertising and story in a way that is very familiar in our post-No Man’s Sky world. The ambitious scope promised in the marketing did not pan out in vanilla Destiny’s handful of locations, and characterization was thin on the ground for both the gun-toting Guardians and the cast of well-known voice actors surrounding them. Destiny 2’s marketing emphasized humor, fun, and a bit more characterization for the three Vanguard....

I can now be placed in the same category as Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Timothy Olyphant and that guy who was doing martial arts in the nude at the beginning of the second one. I find myself alongside these acting heavyweights (and that one other guy) in that I forgot to take one thing into account – that one thing being the involvement of John McClane. Willis is back, looking “too old for this shit” and this time he blows up a helicopter up with a car....