1.10 Lovecraft After a Wayne Manor gardener met a cruel fate, we were met with young Bruce balancing on beams, and another charming look at how the camaraderie between Gotham’s central weirdo kids could go on to define them both as adults. For once, this scene of Bruce training didn’t seem forced. The same could be said of his roof-jumping sequence, which riffed on a popular superhero origin trope whilst offering some solid entertainment too....
2.2 Knock, Knock Holy school bus petrol bomb, Batman! This week’s Gotham is one of the show’s best episodes yet. We’ve been encouraged to think of these opening three episodes of season two as a trilogy, and with that in mind Knock, Knock makes for a stellar second act. Once again stealing the show is Cameron Monaghan’s proto-Joker, Jerome. He’s now incredibly comfortable in the role and continues to impress with every return that he makes....
Grimm Season 6 Episode 11 With three episodes left, the writers have seemingly abandoned what could have been a mild diversion of Wesens having celestial origins, and placed it in an assortment of historical religious texts, books, and the Bible. “Where the Wild Things Were” focused on the prophecy of the Shaphat, a Hebrew word meaning child bride. The only child bride available is Diana. Eve used blood magic last week to open a portal into a parallel dimension, and this week Nick used the magic stick to enter....
Grimm Season 6 Episode 7 Vengeance tends to be one-sided, kept alive by the person who might have been wronged. Rage plays out in the imagination, rendering the avenging planner blind to the consequences of their actions. Retaliation is rarely bedfellows with forgiveness. The recipient of bad timing, misfortune, or a slight, holds a grudge and plots retribution in the wings. Meanwhile, the perpetrator goes about their life unabated under the bright lights on center stage....
This week’s episode is again penned by Fuller (with Steve Lightfoot) so I guess it’s off to the medicine cabinet for some Ambien once again! Such a screwed up show starts so tranquilly, with a pleasant dream of Will fishing with the woman he is accused of killing, Abigail Hobbs. The dream is contrasted by the sudden fade to Will’s cell and a visit from Beverly Katz, who brings him pictures of the tableau killer and reveals that Will was correct, that the killer was sewn into his own installation piece....
And now, the question of the hour: What does Mara know about Duke’s mother? Is she Duke’s mother? Man. I hope she is not Duke’s mother. It’s hard enough on the rare occasion when Duke opens up about his upsetting childhood, hearing about the time his mom propositioned him in exchanged for drugs was grim enough — I don’t need (nor do any us) the added terror of Mara the awful revealing herself as his mother....
Cristine Rose shines in her limited screen time as the Petrelli matriarch; her icy pragmatism coupled with genuine concern for her newly-discovered granddaughter are superbly real, and her presence undercuts the increasingly overwrought “zomg, I have emotional problems!” that characterie most of Nathan/Peter/Claire’s scenes. Jessica cements her standing as Most Awesome Character ever by proving that not only is she a gun-toting sociopath, but a good mother to boot. On refusing to let Linderman use her son as a pawn in whatever scheme he’s got cooking, it’s left to the talents of shape-shifting minx Candace to go over Jessica’s head....
As ever, not everything is as it seems, and it’s up to everyone’s favourite excitable Japanese man to try and figure out just what he needs to do when he returns to the past. There’s plenty of mystery as to what’s happened over the past five years, and while a lot of ideas are pure X-men rip-offs (substitute the name ‘Sylar’ with ‘Magneto’ and the parallels are…well, copyright infringements), there’s a lot left undisclosed....
Now after its year-end hiatus the show is back, and has show runner Tim Kring learned anything from the barrage of abuse he’s received from TV critics across the globe? One of my biggest complaints was how none of the heroes was remotely connected to reality, as in having to earn a living. And almost immediately at the start of A Clear and Present Danger (Volume Four: Fugitives) that’s what we get!...
Joint Enterprise. It sounds like a judicious scheme. Why should members of a group who set out with the common goal of murder evade justice only because they didn’t – or it couldn’t be proved that they did – deliver the killing blow? What difference is there, says the doctrine, between the person who commits a crime, and the person who instructs them or stands by their side in foresight and complicity of what they’re about to do?...
Once hyperspace is conquered, the next step is to explore the timeline. Star Wars Rebels recently opened up a new dimension with the starry sky of the World Between Worlds, a mystical place where all times happen at once. By unlocking the Jedi Temple on Lothal and finely attuning himself to the Force, Ezra Bridger enters this strange space and finds himself able to visit doors into the past and future....
“We thought about it for a long time and came up with what we think is a bittersweet way to say goodbye to these characters, but the right way,” he told the audience (via Entertainment Weekly). “The film is about letting go, or finding the wisdom to let go, rather”. In other words, the film is probably going to feature a scene where Hiccup has to say goodbye to Toothless and everyone is going to come out crying....
1.5 Ambassadors Complex shows, audiences can deal with. The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire… are all complex and eminently watchable, because their complexity is driven by characters we believe in. Complicated shows that feature more twist and turn than character however, are simply tiring. At episode five, just when Hunted should be ramping up our interest, its increasingly spiralling narrative and piling on of underwritten character after character (Meera Syal’s just popped up as a Pakistani presidential candidate, Aidan’s living under an assumed identity, the fake Dr Goebel is actually on Hunter’s side, the list goes on…) just feels exhausting....
Why? Because when you put horribly clichéd dialogue where Keeley Hawes character, DSI Martha Lawson gets told by her boss that the man she’ll be working with is ‘damaged goods’, then in my book you’ve admitted defeat before you’ve even started. Let’s start with Keeley, who is the headline act here. She’s playing a tough and independent women who fancies her co-worker, so she’s never done that before. But more of an issue for her is at the end of the first episode I knew nothing more about her character than I did at the start....
He speaks here about his quirky, yet tight working relationship with Tarantino, the pressures behind filming Inglourious Basterds, and his period as a Global Warming awareness activist. Well, as a producer it’s always different depending on who you’re working with. With Quentin, Quentin is an auteur, so my job is really to support him and his vision. He obviously writes a script, he hands a script that usually says ‘final draft’ on it, and usually, during the process, he reads me scenes – it’s not like he gives me pages, he doesn’t usually give anyone pages, but what he does is he tends to enjoy sitting you down and reading you stuff, it’s like Tarantino Theatre in a sense....
Everyone knows the rule. The better a comicbook movie, the better its sequel. It was true of Spider-Man. It was true of X-Men. It was true of Batman (twice). And given that some of us count Iron Man as one of the best comicbook movies yet committed to film, there was no reason to think that a reunion of the same director and cast would break that universal law. There’s no escaping that Iron Man 2, while a decent film in its own right, sits inescapably in the shadow of the original – and if you go into it armed with that knowledge, the experience will be all the more enjoyable....
The movie has had its detractors too, but from its euphoric critical reception last June to its stunning box office performance—having the most impressive holdovers of any $100 million-plus budgeted blockbuster ever—Wonder Woman has clearly captured the imaginations of most American moviegoers, young and old. It is probably for that reason it surprised again Friday afternoon when the Producers Guild of America included Wonder Woman in its 11-film lineup for the Daryl F....
iZombie Season 4, Episode 1 Brains are back in a big way, people. In the iZombie season four premiere, much has changed in the three (almost four) months since the world found out about the existence of zombies. In the time since, Seattle has evolved into New Seattle, a walled city where zombies and humans are working to live together. At the New Seattle PD, human cops are paired with zombie cops to solve murders....
Over the next three years the group transformed its bubbly image into a sexier one, but its continuing success was marred behind the scenes by recurrent disagreements between the band members. In 1984 a near-fatal coach-crash left singer Mike Nolan severely injured, and the group disbanded shortly afterwards to be reincarnated several times over (at the time of writing, fifteen people have now been in the line-up of Bucks Fizz, a turnover matched only by The Village People!...
First I’d like to say that despite my misgivings about Episode 4, overall this was a taut exercise that gripped the viewer with its clever conundrums and sleek performances. Top of the acting accolades must go to James Nesbitt, who moves transformation unhindered between Dr. Jackman and Mr. Hyde with consummate ease. On a least a half dozen occasions, he had a least one leg in ‘Jekyll the Panto’, but managed to stop himself sliding into utterly wild farce....
