The leaking of pre-air American TV show pilots is rapidly turning from a trickle into a monsoon. First True Blood and now the Americanised version of BBC’s Life On Mars. For any of the actors in this production reading this, you’re not doing much wrong, it’s just this doesn’t work – it’s lost in translation. The UK version worked because it anchored itself in our TV lore, using The Sweeney and Softy-Softly Task Forceas cultural references....
When it comes to film composers, Evanghelos Odyssey Papthanassiou, better know simply as Vangelis, is one of the more unusual. Where most composers write for huge orchestras (here’s looking at you, Hans Zimmer), Vangelis sits behind his huge banks of synths creating beautifully elegant and purely electronic pieces. While in Aphrodite’s Child, Vangelis started to become involved in other projects including early scores for short films and also recording a number of solo electronic albums (he also released material under the name Odyssey and worked with Yes singer Jon Anderson), but it was one of his scores to wildlife documentaries, Opera Sauvage, that brought him to the attention of some of the worlds top film makers and lead to his work on Chariots Of Fire (1981)....
Mute, Jones’ first film since his 2016 videogame adaptation, Warcraft, takes in touches of Blade Runner‘s noir thriller atmosphere and Moon’s quirky characters and poignant otherness. The result, however, is a genre piece that doesn’t hang together as well as either of those films. Alexander Skarsgard stars as Leo, a 30-something bartender working in a near-future Berlin. Among a high-tech cultural melting pot, Leo stands apart from everyone else: a childhood accident robbed him of the ability to speak, and his Amish upbringing means that he avoids the use of electronic gadgets wherever possible....
The Bensons have just finished an acclaimed run on Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, not a million miles away from the world of Oliver Queen and Green Arrow when you think about it. They’re not wasting any time introducing a new villain, the Citizen, who will be at odds with both Green Arrow and Oliver Queen. We sat down with them at SDCC to talk about where Citizen fits into Green Arrow’s world and more, before Green Arrow #43 arrives on August 1....
Adapted by Ford from Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony And Susan, the story begins when disillusioned art curator Susan (Amy Adams) receives her ex-husband Edward Sheffield’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) novel, which he has dedicated to her. Susan is left confused: she’s had no contact with Edward in decades, for reasons that aren’t initially revealed. Why, then, would he dedicate the book to her? As Susan starts reading the book we are told the story, with Gyllenhaal as Tony Hastings, a man whose life is torn apart after a violent and terrifying event when he and his wife and daughter are confronted by three men on a desolate road....
1.1 Down the Rabbit Hole Once Upon a Time in Wonderland is an imaginative, whimsical adventure – the question is how much sticky sweet Mallow Marsh you’re willing to slog through to get to it. In the end, it boils down to this: If you are a romantic, you’ll love Once in Wonderland. If not, expect a lot of eye rolling in between the good parts. Wonderland tells the story of Alice (Sophie Lowe), the little girl from Lewis Carroll’s classic novels, when she’s grown up....
5.1 Dark Swan Flashbacks, questionable CGI, Lost easter eggs, and new Disney princesses? That’s right, Once Upon A Time is back. The new season kicks off right where we left it; with the awesome cliffhanger of learning Emma Swan is the new Dark One. As season arcs go, this is much preferred over the Frozen storyline, which lost its popularity quicker than Olaf melting in the sun. Once can sometimes get caught up by its ‘new Disney character of the week’ and lose clarity, so refocusing back onto the core cast and exploring their characters can only make for a stronger season....
This Penny Dreadful review contains spoilers. Penny Dreadful is the home to all our favorite monsters. It is House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and women, and Mad Monster Party on a suitably suspenseful set. The music is perfect. The lighting is perfect. The dark corners are populated. Tonight, Vanessa finds a good man, a mighty mighty good man, who’s got enough bad boy in him to love the monsters....
“Possession,” explained John Lennon on how his drug bust impacted his American naturalization process, “is nine tenths of the problem.” And so it is for Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) on Penny Dreadful. Just when you think you can sit back and enjoy a nice screw, the devil and its buddies take advantage of the ensuing esoteric state and get all up in her erotic ectoplasm. But, see, that’s not that half of it....
The fact that there’s now a sequel might be confusing for some people, not least the parents who regretted taking their kids along to the lacklustre first instalment, but we all know by now that kids movies aren’t green-lit off the back of critical adoration or positive buzz – it’s about merchandise and marketability. The first is with its story, which trades the underdog-achieves-his-dreams cliché for a moral message about finding joy in something new when life knocks you down....
In one of the show’s most inventive skits, Nina uses Evite to create an elaborate 32nd birthday celebration. Here we see the flexibility Portlandia has established in Season 3, when the party is used as a device to finally bring all of the Portlandia characters together and have them interact. It’s one of the first episodes where every skit progresses the main story line and it shows the good that a commitment to character development can bring....
Thankfully, Troy is along for the ride and some of Robo Knights arc rubs off on him. While Troy hasn’t exactly grown as a character (if anything the writers seemed to forget about him on a pretty consistent basis), he at least gets to act as a catalyst for Robo Knights growth. In the finale of Megaforce, Robo Knight gives Troy his blaster, signifying Troy needs to carry on where he left off in accomplishing his goal of protecting the earth/environment....
5.10 A Dark Ali Last week’s cliffhanger saw a confession from Alison’s supposed kidnapper, Cyrus, and the episode continued the ongoing theme of not knowing what the heck Alison is thinking from one scene to the next. Is she a vulnerable teenage girl who regrets her actions and is just trying to protect herself, or is she the same conniving monster that she was before she left? That flashback of her being stabbed was a point in the former column, but then we found out that it had been Ali who had hired Cyrus to confess in the first place....
While at first this seemed liked a fluff episode, with the return of Jenny (for a one-off cameo) and a happy reunion with her ex-friends at the ARC, there was actually a lot more going on in Primeval than just evil hyenas, and a lot of comedy moments involving supposed paintball and team building. While the main story was, indeed, a bit of lightheated fun, the overall story arcs that have been the main thrust of the more serious aspects of the show seemed to hit a high point this week....
And so it came to be that – after a series of made-for-TV spin-offs failed to make it past the drawing board – Buffy’s creator turned his pen once again to the Scooby Gang, this time in comic book form. Unbeknownst to our heroine, the American government have labelled Buffy’s new gang as a terrorist threat, in a plotline that apes the under-appreciated Initiative of season four, with strong suggestions that special agent Riley Finn might mince onto the page at any moment and start dispensing his usual brand of white bread wisdom....
If you disagree with these statements I’d suggest skipping the rest of this article and going straight to the comment threads to insult me. Or, better, we can agree that we have different approaches to playing games and both get on with our lives. My previous writing about MMOs has invited some charming abuse, so I figured I’d best get this little disclaimer out of the way early. For the record I’m not insulting anyone who plays these games, just the games they choose to play....
The movie opens with Riddick having what he generously describes as “a legendary bad day”. Double-crossed by the Necromongers – the cult-like warrior race from the previous movie – he’s left for dead on a godforsaken desert planet full of various slithering, toothsome monsters. Feasting on alien eel meat and befriending a dog-type-thing dubbed a ‘dingo-jingo’, Riddick forges a passable existence on this lonely rock – until two factions of bounty hunters show up, both intent on capturing Riddick either dead or alive....
2.10 Shadow Of A Doubt That’s the driving question behind this entire second season of Riverdale, and it’s one that most viewers — this writer included — have dismissed with a simple ‘duh, it’s Betty’s dad.’ And while Hal Cooper is doubtlessly and deeply involved in the Hood’s murderous antics, tonight’s events have illustrated that there is likely more than one Hood terrorising the town. The town’s debate was always going to be bloodbath for Fred, with Hermione’s using Archie’s formation of the Black Circle vigilante group as her secret weapon to prove that the elder Andrews can’t control his son, so there’s no way he can keep Riverdale safe....
Series nine’s final heat had everything there is to love about Robot Wars: impressive engineering, scrappy underdogs, kooky newcomers with it’ll-never-work designs (they didn’t work), and at the centre of it all, a grudge match. “People want to see stuff getting smashed, that’s why we’re here,” replied Dave with the sagacity of a seasoned pro. Stuff getting smashed was exactly what we saw thanks to Carbide’s new and improved weapon which span at something like a billion miles an hour (I’m estimating) and emitted a death-hum that could be heard all the way from Glasgow to Hadrian’s Wall....
