Ego is a silly concept; make no mistake, a bearded planet with a leering face that floats through the cosmos destroying other words, but many writers of many comics have handled the innate silliness with panache, never blinking at the absurd nature of the character. Other times, writers have taken a more farcical route to presenting Ego, embracing the absurdity and just going with it. The obvious, simple, and base way to go is to turn Ego into a twenty-two minute booger and zit joke....

As the follow-up to Waititi’s amusing vampire send-up, What We Do in the Dark, the Kiwi filmmaker hews closer to his earlier directorial roots, including Boy and even shades of Flight of the Conchords, with Wilderpeople, which sees him returning home to adapt this popular New Zealand allegory. Based on Barry Crump’s Wild Pork and Watercress, Hunt for the Wilderpeople begins as an overly familiar coming of age drama spliced with a reclamation project when husky problem child Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) is shepherded to his potentially final foster parents....

After a good start last week, what we got this week wasn’t quite up to the standard I’ve come to expect with Hustle. It didn’t really help that the story was focused on a previously unknown acquaintance of Ash, the abysmally bad grifter ‘Liability’ Finch, played by Mark Benton. It starts with Finch taking a valuable painting from a house in Rio, where the security wouldn’t have stopped cows browsing, never mind an art robbery....

2.2. 12 Days Of Christine This week’s instalment of Inside No. 9’s six standalone mystery plays took a drastically different turn from twisty series 2 opener La Couchette. Also directed by horror director Guillem Morales, The 12 Days of Christine moved from following a group of people in (almost) real time as they deal with a particular set of difficulties and instead introduced one central character as the focus. Here we were invited to spend time with Sheridan Smith’s Christine over the course of 12 important days of her life – a seemingly simple set up that, as to be expected from No....

2.6 The Seance Leading us towards those jolts was that well-used trope from horror films and television – the seance. Yet again, writers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith have carefully plundered cinema and television past for references the audience will recognise in order to set the action (and the ruse…) up quickly; the antique props used to call the spirits forward, the black-laced medium with milky white eyes, and a wide-eyed outsider drawn to speak to the dead....

It’s an entertaining thriller nonetheless, one that’s been championed by and centred around Tom Cruise. Serving as star and producer, the bone of contention to this point has been his suitability to take on the role of the character as portrayed in the Lee Child’s books on which the film is based. The truth, of course, is that he doesn’t take on the exact same character, and inevitably, moving any such powerful figure from page to screen is going to raise concerns....

As they’re passed through the moviemaking filter, these age-old tales generally altered in the process. Snow White And The Huntsman gave the age-old story an epic spin, and imagined the normally genteel heroine as an armour clad warrior. Hansel & Grettel: Witch Hunters used its fairytale inspiration as a basis for a gory action yarn. Meanwhile, the Wachowskis are working on yet another retelling of the story; called Jupiter, it will reportedly send Snow White into space....

We’ve talked to the friendly and very talented James Moran at Den of Geek before (back when his Doctor Who episode, The Fires Of Pompeii, had just aired), when we spent a mammoth session in a Starbucks Coffee shop, accompanied by the screams of children in the background. Fortunately, it was all a bit calmer this time round, as he told us all about what we can expect from this week’s episode of Primeval....

At McIsaac’s store, the pair befriend lonely-looking youth Spencer Treat Clark, who has heard them talking about smoking pot and offers them to come back to his motel room to try out some good stuff that he happens to have. If you can stand the original 1972 Wes Craven outing, you can stand Dennis Iliadis’s extraordinarily faithful remake. Yes, the rape scene is hard to watch and very cruel, but cruelty is what Last House was always about, back when cruelty was relatively new on the American cinema circuit, and the original rape scene is hard to watch too....

Legends of Tomorrow Season 3 Episode 2 I’m…not sure how I feel about the new status quo on Legends of Tomorrow.The show has generally leaned into the humor and absurdity of the fringes of a superhero universe – it’s one of the things that made it maybe the strongest superhero show on television. But the shift from last season’s desperate, frantic sprint to save the universe from permanent alterations at the hands of three psychopaths that led to broken rules and more broken timelines, to this year’s “gang of lovable screw ups” has been pretty jarring....

Lethal Weapon Season 2 Episode 1 Last year, FOX’s take on Lethal Weapon surprised many viewers—myself included—by not only being a faithful film-to-television adaptation, but one that actually thrives on the relationships that the films built while pushing those dynamics to even more impressive territory. The series even started incorporating the extended Lethal Weapon universe into the show, like Joe Pesci’s inscrutable lawyer, Leo Getz (played sublimely by the always-enjoyable Thomas Lennon), and the show continues to find its voice....

Matt Lucas and David Walliams would be instantly recognisable to anyone who’d ever seen the show Little Britain. Unfortunately, that won’t be a lot of Americans. (I’ve seen it, but I’m sure by now most of the readers here know I’m not like most Americans and routinely stop on Britcoms as part of my regular TV viewing.) This first episode has been greatly hyped by HBO and features a guest-starring shot by Rosie O’Donnell, but will it actually keep Americans interested?...

He had me on side early with that preface. Because what it also establishes is the very human, clearly self-authored collection of stories that follows. As a rule, I’m not a fan of the A-Z format that Lucas adopts to give his book structure – he himself comes a cropper when it gets to X! – but it soon becomes clear that he’s pretty much just cheating to keep things in order....

In the late 1970s, Miller trudged off into the remote outskirts of Melbourne with a film crew, a bunch of old cars and a then-unknown Mel Gibson, and came back with a ramshackle, raw sci-fi revenge movie that felt like the cinematic equivalent of punk rock. Decades later, Miller’s back with Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that feels like both a continuation of the original and its two sequels – Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) – and a modern revitalisation of their characters and ideas....

If Mad Men is a portrait of 60s America as ancient Rome, a period of obscene consumption, repression and excess, Don Draper is its Caesar, a man with an insatiable appetite for women and fine dining, an unlimited expense account, and an inexhaustible supply of cigarettes. For the first three seasons at least, he had an apparently endless supply of cash, the perfect house, a blonde, ex-model trophy wife baking cookies at home, and a succession of unspeakably statuesque love interests to gently coax into the bedroom with an arched eyebrow or starched quip....

7.1 Time Zones What does revolution change? Depressingly little, if Time Zones is anything to go by. 1968’s political disquiet simmered underneath Mad Men’s sixth run, erupting at key history book moments to spill into its characters’ lives. It culminated in a finale that severed Don Draper from his job, his wife, and from the fictions he’d woven around himself. “This is where I grew up”, he’d told his children outside that dilapidated bordello, having confessed the same to Hershey mid-pitch....

Maniac Episode 1 Oftentimes the experience of watching a new Netflix property with a critical eye means assessing what this means for Netflix rather than whether the show works on its own merits. Netflix has become such a cultural and entertainment behemoth that it’s hard not to view what it produces through a socioeconomic prism rather than a creative one. Take Maniac for example. The first episode of the ambitious Jonah Hill and Emma Stone reunion project is by any definition bold television....

4.2 Meet The New Boss This week, there are lots of moving parts. The focus of the episode is split between the mystery of the ghostly figures that infected Melinda May last week and more interactions between Daisy and Ghost Rider. Let’s start with Ghost Rider, shall we? This week, Daisy finagles a meeting with Robbie Reyes and secret agents him for more information. She corners Robbie at work, and the young mechanic is none too pleased with Daisy prying into his private life....

5.18 All Roads Lead… What Ruby doesn’t know is that Carl Creel has already bonded with a smidge of Gravitonium and has basically been driven mad. So the already unstable Ruby becoming Gravitonium Girl is just a bad idea. But that’s exactly what happens. This season on Agents Of SHIELD, the show has done a really good job of introducing easy-to-hate, totally badass female villains that you just really want to see take a beat down from our heroes....