Bound We learn that the group’s individual powers have had a little boost since Cassie came to town, and some are happier about this than others. Mean girl Faye is relishing the chance to do whatever she wants without supervision, but others are rightly showing a little more caution. If the group bind themselves together, their strength as a circle will rise, but they’ll have to give up some of their own in return....

Sally Hawkins stars as Eliza, a mute, lonely woman whose only close friend is the eccentric neighbour in the next apartment – Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay commercial illustrator who, like Eliza, lives alone. Each day, Eliza wakes up, puts some eggs on the boil, has a bath, enthusiastically pleasures herself, and then heads off to work on the bus. Del Toro puts an incredible amount of detail into his fantasy worlds, and his heightened version of a late-50s America is a sumptuous thing all by itself....

I’m going to miss Homer #1, his irrepressible humor, his insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst. We’ve gone through so much. And come back for seconds. Free refills and all the shrimp we could eat. Thank science for Professor Frink, until Bart recorded over Homer, he begloibened the day. Homer has had a storied story. He came into this world a kind of magical gorilla, lived as a fat, fat, fat, reckless fat pig, died his way into the future future through a series of surplus wholesale clones, will be downloaded onto a zip drive, turned into a screensaver (bonk, bonk, ooh corner, badonk) and finally transported into a robot who sounds like Kazoo, the alien on The Flintstones....

The Strain Season 3 Episode 7 The last few episodes of The Strain have gone pretty big. We’ve had the attack on Central Park that saw the deaths of thousands of strigoi while thousands more poured out from beneath New York and took the city by force. We’ve had the confrontation between Quinlan and the Master that led to the Master losing his body. We’ve had a flashback on Setrakian’s ultimate revenge against a former Nazi doctor....

The Strain Season 4 Episode 2 Last week, as we began to experience the final season of The Strain, the series introduced a horrific dystopian world and featured Eph and Fet trying to navigate that world. With Eph trying to survive in Philadelphia and Fet trying to find a missile silo in North Dakota, fans learned about this new propaganda driven strigoi world, but the narrative didn’t really allow us to go inside the inner workings of the new strigoi monarchy....

I blooming love Robyn. Since she was first dumped on the Department of Social Affairs she has acted as the anti-Tucker of the show. Nervous to the point of shaking, doe-eyed in the face of even the most simple decision, and nautical miles out of her depth, it’s hard to shake the feeling that if you worked in government you would probably be her. Take the loss of a USB stick of details....

The appearance of twins, one a Tomorrow Person (Cyrus), one not (Nathan), is pretty much Jedikiah’s wet dream. Ultra catches one. Cara catches the other. Jed arranges a trap, hoping to be able to study both. The problem is, trying to transfer powers from one sibling to another doesn’t end well for the one with the powers, as they die a horrible painful death, but Jed is willing to give it another go for science’s sake!...

I guess I should talk about the Alaric-induced amnesia that shook the ovary-having world watching the show today. After considerable (and appropriately moody) hemming and hawing, Elena Eternal Sunshined of The Spotless Mind her feelings and memories of Damon until they were no more. In fact, she remembers him now only as a monster who died. That is Stone Cold Steve Austin. To further rub salt into the wound, we were treated to the moment where Elena first realized she loved Damon....

4.13 Into The Wild It’s another week of heartfelt conversations and twisty turny plots on The Vampire Diaries, as the hunt for the cure heats up and more information on Shane’s master-plan is revealed to the gang. Personally, I’m not entirely sure we needed any more information, since the explanations offered to us make even less sense than the ones we had assumed before. Isn’t it enough to see our favourite characters scramble about and bicker over a cure that may or may not exist?...

4.19 Pictures of You It’s been a couple of weeks since there was a party in Mystic Falls, so it must be time for the ladies and gents of the town (or at least the high school) to dust off all of their finery for senior prom. Episodes of The Vampire Diaries set around some kind of event are usually entertaining and, despite all of the same problems season four of the show has been stumbling over for nineteen weeks, this is no different....

4.4 The Five Things are getting complicated in Mystic Falls again, as episode four, The Five, introduces us to our main mission for the fourth season of The Vampire Diaries. Thankfully, even though we do get some juicy love triangle stuff this week, the show seems to have regained focus on what draws a large portion of fans into the action. With a new object to find and the goodies and baddies joining forces in increasingly ambiguous ways, we can hope for a return to form this season....

5.2 True Lies Other character arcs are getting less interesting as the season progresses, and I just wish someone behind the scenes would remind the writers that a large portion of the audience hate Bonnie. Making her a whiny ineffectual ghost instead of a judgemental witch for hire isn’t going to fix that and making Jeremy start another romantic relationship with a ghost is more than slightly ridiculous. Remember when this show actually killed characters off?...

6.2 Prayer For The Dying With a title like that, it was always clear to the audience that someone would be kicking the bucket in this episode. Now, on another show it might have been too obvious to kill Liz, who had apparently been cured by Caroline’s vampire blood in the previous episode, but Vampire Diaries has always done well with twisting the expected. When Jeremy ‘died’ in season four we all assumed that he’d be back the next week, and the show created an entire episode based around that audience complacency....

7.4 I Carry Your Heart With Me We knew from the moment that Jo was on screen, and not just a whisper covered in a sheet in a morgue drawer, that she’d probably be back this episode. How we got there, though, was actually pretty entertaining. Most likely detecting that the Heretics are terrible, I Carry Your Heart With Me was an exercise in humanising the two worst members – Nora (side note: someone actually said “bloody Nora”) and Mary-Louise....

5.14 Spend This is a common thread in all situations where someone from Rick’s group interacts with the folks from Alexandria. They assume positions of leadership simply because they’re both more experienced and more able to do the things that need to be done, even when it puts them in grave danger. There’s something to be said for following someone into Hell when you’re behind them, not being pushed in front of them....

The Walking Dead season 5 premiere, “No Sanctuary,” is all business. By “business” I mean lots and lots of killing. Although there have been large action sequences on the show before — the Governor’s attack on the Prison last season perhaps the biggest of all — I haven’t quite seen this kind of body count. It’s to showrunner Scott Gimple’s and director Greg Nicotero’s credit that the show is able to cover so much ground plot- and character-wise while still keeping the action turned up to 11....

But that is a pretty hard thing to predict considering that about after a month of production, the film’s initial director, Kevin Jarre, was replaced mid-production. Jarre, who also wrote the screenplay, was primarily a writer whose credits include 1989’s poignant Glory. However, he and Russell did not apparently hit it off on the Tombstone set, and Jarre was eventually let go after falling behind schedule. Thus First Blood II: Rambo director George P....

The whole Top Gun 2 story has come as something of a surprise, even though it’s not the first time that rumours of a Top Gun sequel have surfaced. Nonetheless, a healthy part of us suspect that it would all be declared nonsense, and locked away for a further four or five years before chatter started doing the rounds again. However, it looks like this is the real deal. In the US at the moment, junket interviews are taking place for Tony Scott’s latest film, the Denzel Washington-starring Unstoppable, which we get over here in November....

Although a mythology-based X-Files sequel is widely anticipated in 2012 to coincide with the date of the ‘final alien invasion’ as known by millennia of shadow governments, 2012 is considered by many X-Files fans to be too long a wait for the next movie instalment, as only one X-Files movie has been released since the series ended its ninth and final season in 2002. Christian officially launched the popular Facebook group, “Bring Back Tooms!...

It’s been a while since I’ve delved into the archives of Torchwood – if by “while” I mean “three frakking months”. So sorry to keep you waiting – and with season two of the Doctor Who spin-off nearing, it’s time we best get down to it… Which is what episode five, entitled “Small Worlds”, did. While not the Toshiko episode I was hoping for (and will hopefully get!), it was a creepy little watch that shed a little bit of light on Captain Jack’s past as a time-traveller while adding shades to the mysterious character....