1.18 Salvation Starting with Team Arrow, then, the trio of Oliver, Diggle and Felicity is still working really nicely. While it annoys me on principle when it’s the female character who wants to talk about their feelings all of the time, she’s at least capable enough to genuinely help on missions, and her naivety can be explained by the fact that she’s the newest, and least war-torn member of the team....
Whether you warmed to the fourth episode of Ashes To Ashes’ final series or not, there’s surely one moment that we’re all agreed on: the Blue Peter garden moment, for viewers of a certain age, was absolute comedy gold. That said, for our money, this fourth episode was on the whole more in keeping with the quality of last week’s episode more than the barnstorming opening two instalments. That’s to say it was a good to very good episode, but not quite Ashes To Ashes firing on all cylinders....
2.8 The Madness Of Hercules As Jason languishes behind bars, the friends are divided. Hercules goes on the search for his lost love, the Gorgon Medusa, and must comfort her as she struggles with her actions. Seemingly cured, she’s the one person who can free Jason, but only by sacrificing her own life. With Ariadne unable to do anything to prevent the execution of her love, Cilix and Melas, two of her closest advisers, continue to push Pasiphae’s agenda, invoking the wrath of Poseidon and the people upon the young queen and driving her to act against Jason to appease the Gods....
That’s when you remember that modern comics, where Axe Cop’s exploits seem at home, are far different from your average cartoon. When Axe Cop chops someone’s head off in the comics, it’s fine. We expect that kind of thing from that kind of medium. In animated form, it’s a different story. For example, take the latest episode of the Axe Cop cartoon. The very first scene is Axe Cop decapitating a woman in front of her boyfriend and playing it off because according to him, she’s really a bad person who punches people with poison....
The nostalgia-sodden world of Back To The Future was always going to be the company’s greatest challenge, and the scale here has previously been unseen with Secret Cinema. But rather than getting lost in the sheer scope of the project, the attention to detail here is both precise and attention grabbing as a spectacle. Based within a car park in Hackney Wick, East London, the tall and imposing sight of Westfield Stratford City shopping centre and the remains of the Olympic legacy looms large over the production....
5.6 The Last Broadcast It may have lost its way from time to time, with some difficult cast changes along the way, but how great is it for the show like this to go out on a high? Series five has been a step up from the previous year in so many ways, and it’s clear from this episode that a level of care has been taken with the finale that too often isn’t applied....
5.4 The Greater Good The two new guests at Honolulu Heights come courtesy of Rook, as he tasks Tom with babysitting a previously contained werewolf while he goes to negotiate funding with the Chinese government. Bobby is even more clueless and naive than Tom was when he first lost McNair, and it’s hilarious to see Michael Socha’s character look down his nose at someone such a hair’s breadth away from his own experience....
Black Lightning Season 1, Episode 7 “Be better than me,” Jefferson Pierce tells Anissa in some of the final moments of the episode, wishing for his child what most parents wish for their kids: to be happy, yes, but to be better than they were. To learn from their mistakes. To surpass the example they set. It’s social evolution at the most basic level, and it’s a theme that superhero stories, at least on the screen, have not spent a lot of time exploring....
Black Sails Season 3 Episode 8 Yes, we start out with more talking, but this week at least the pirates have something to say. I found the opening conversation between Flint and Vane to be very enlightening. And, probably, true to the time period. The distinction between rich and poor in 1716 was absolute. A man who lived his life as Vane has lived his life would probably never have been in a place as “normal” as Miranda’s house....
Blood Drive Episode 10 Blood Drive episode 10, “Scar Tissue,” picks the scabs away from the environmental disaster at the heart of the show. At its core, Blood Drive is a dystopian future film set in the recent past. In all post-apocalyptic movies, and TV shows, small communities spring up in the aftermath of whatever catastrophe messed up the earth, and each of them has something itchy under the surface. Once again we see an homage to A Boy and His Dog, which Blood Drive already winked at a few weeks ago in the desert community built at a day spa....
Blood Drive Episode 12 Blood Drive, episode 12, “Faces of Blood Drive,” brings us past the race into the championship circle, where the Primo jacket only fits one and all the champs are chumps. The Blood Drive racers, even though the show is only an underground hit seen by the executives at Heart Enterprises, a diminishing lot, are rock stars in the post-Scar 1999. They are feted and feasted and foisted on the festering public....
5.4 Cuanto Knowing the destinies of characters like Capone and his almost-associate Charlie Luciano might threaten to rob them of any dramatic tension, but as we see this week, there’s more than enough of that to go around. The near exposure of Van Alden’s fraudulent life not only provided us with the first hint that this exceptionally long character arc might yet have an appropriate conclusion (a suspicion bolstered by Mike D’Angelo’s trawl through the records office) but also gave us a Capone scene that was tense, terrifying and blackly hilarious....
If you are an actor, BoJack Horseman should be required viewing. If you are a human, BoJack Horseman should be required viewing. Previous seasons of the series have seen advertising campaigns that capitalize on BoJack’s antihero status. The promotional material for this season however sees BoJack being compared to some of TV’s greatest devils—the likes of Tony Soprano, Frank Underwood, and Don Draper—and this is the year that finally earns that comparison....
Now that’s a finale DoG-ers! Can’t wait till Season 6.
But for those of us who grew up in the eighties, on a diet of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan and the slew of bloodthirsty sword and sorcery movies that followed in the wake of its box office success, then this new take on the character will prove to be a somewhat nostalgic treat. Just as last year saw the re-emergence of such throwback, mega violent spectacles as The Expendables and Ninja Assassin, Conan The Barbarian follows suit, swinging its sword proudly above its head, while keeping its tongue firmly in its cheek....
2.1 Where Is Josh’s Friend? Well, obviously not, because season 2 would be pretty boring if so. Also, despite its romantic comedy trappings, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s first season was pretty clear about the fact that winning Josh was never going to be the answer to all Rebecca’s problems. As the credits used to say, the situation’s a lot more nuanced than that. Rebecca might think she’s starring in a Disney movie where a kiss (okay, a lot more than just a kiss…) from her prince will set off fireworks and a parade of happiness, but we know better....
Let’s just get it out of the way: Deadpool 2 is hilarious. Perhaps even more so than the first movie, Ryan Reynolds and David Leitch’s follow-up to the Merc with a Mouth’s last big screen adventure is unapologetically irreverent to the point of self-parody. Quite literally so during the movie’s demented post-credits scene, which culminates with Reynolds’ 2018 Deadpool popping up during the climax of his first appearance as Wade Wilson: 2009’s largely forgotten X-Men Origins: Wolverine....
Here’s some great trivia for you, though: had the sequel happened, it might – just might – have co-starred the Oscar-winning Meryl Streep. According to the Projection Booth – and picked up by Slashfilm – Demolition Man producer Joel Silver and co-writer Daniel Waters had actually talked about a sequel and what Stallone’s hero, John Spartan, might get up to. And one of the threads in that sequel would’ve seen Spartan track down the daughter he’d left behind when he was frozen in 1996; by 2023, the year he woke up, she’d of course grown into a full-grown woman....
All-American young couple Zach (Zach Gilford) and Sam (Allison Miller) enjoy the perfect white wedding before embarking on a sun-drenched honeymoon in the Dominican Republic. Shortly after the newlyweds return from their holiday, Sam discovers that she’s fallen unexpectedly pregnant, and as the bump in her belly grows, her husband begins to suspect that the fruit of Sam’s womb might have a distinctly unholy origin. There’s the seed of a great idea in Devil’s Due, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (part of the horror filmmaking team collectively known as Radio Silence, who created the Halloween segment of the horror anthology feature, V/H/S)....
Disenchantment Episode 2 The odd thing about “For Whom the Pig Oinks” is it reveals that Disenchantment’s pilot was actually a two-parter all along. Disenchantment is the first consciously serialized Matt Groening show so there are plot threads and character developments that connect each episode to the previous, but there are still usually clear, self-contained conflicts, too. However, this episode picks up immediately where the last one left off and shares the same conflict: Bean is being forced to get married and she’s trying to escape that fate....
