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After the uncertain footing of last week’s mixed bag of an episode, it’s great to see the show broadly back on form, especially as it is doing something new, namely, steering Malcolm into the full limelight of the show, after years of being the savage shark who only ever swam in halfway through the episode to attack incompetent politicos. But it was the emergence of Fleming, and the return of the blue skies windbag Julius Nicholson, who provided a real sign that something was afoot....

5.12 The Devil Inside Because, despite the fact that Enzo is around, leading Damon astray after his break-up with Kelena (Katherine in Elena’s body, for future reference), the business with the doppelgangers and Whitmore college all seems like a big waste of time right now. Are the writers just throwing stuff out there at random and hoping something sticks? Something that fans have taken to their hearts is Katherine’s redemption and, now that she has apparently permanent residence inside Elena’s body, I worry that she’ll also be ushered out of the figurative door by episode fifteen....

5.20 What Lies Beneath That’s not usually the show’s style, with all the characters being in one place a rare enough occasion, but the weekend in a remote cabin cliché is useful for a show full of ulterior motives and ghosts – figurative and literal. We know from the end of last week’s very good episode that Enzo is in no way gone from these characters’ lives and, with Stefan and Elena hell-bent on keeping his death a secret from Damon, it was only a matter of time before he started haunting the heck out of them....

7.2 Never Let Me Go Of course, its only week two, and things are far from a done deal, but Never Let Me Go was paint-by-numbers Vampire Diaries right down to the episode title. Seriously, I had to go and look up if there had been an episode called that already and, for all the surprises it delivered, there might as well have been. We have Caroline being tortured by badly-written lesbians (I point that out because, quite simply, the show needs to do much, much better with its Queer characters), Damon mooning over Elena (please don’t let this be a thing), Stefan reacting to everything around him instead of driving the story himself, Bonnie doing convenient magic, Matt getting pissy about being repeatedly used as the token human, and Enzo being petulant....

Drawn By: Charlie Adlard Last month’s The Walking Dead #104 ended with Carl killing several of Negan’s men and the capturing of Carl. So, let’s find out what Robert Kirkman has in-store for our young hero, shall we? The Walking Dead #105 begins where its predecessor ends, with Negan talking to Carl. Negan decides to take Carl for a walk and tells Carl that he is a “badass” and shouldn’t be scared of him because it is a disappointment....

6.8 Start To Finish The Walking Dead has put together a very good first half of season six, but the mid-season finale seems to grind everything to a halt as far as show progress is concerned. The episodes leading up to this have been pretty tense and tightly plotted, and rather than getting some sort of plot resolution as we’ve seen in previous mid-season finales, Start To Finish is full of cliffhangers....

Turn Season 3 Episode 6 The latest episode of Turn: Washington’s Spies starts with a flashback to a crucial turning-point in season 2: when an attack on Samuel Townsend’s farm in Oyster Bay, Long Island, prompted his son Robert (Nick Westrate) to abandon neutrality and join the Culper Ring in spying on the British military. In these reviews I try to avoid spoiling an episode’s main surprises, especially those that come out toward the climax....

Hobbes (Charles Mesure) was introduced to the show as a much needed man of action. The Fifth Column was all talking and planning, and they had no actual way of doing anything on any large scale since, you know, they’re all a bunch of civilians. Sure, Father Jack, Action Priest had spent a few years in the Gulf, but that was as an Army Chaplain. How much fighting skill could he possibly have?...

V starts with one of the most impressively ominous cold openings I’ve seen on TV in quite some time, and it just keeps getting more and more interesting. The Visitor ships descend on 29 major cities around the world, including New York and Los Angeles, in a scene similar to the appearance of the alien crafts in Independence Day. However, when the ID ships opened up with death lasers, the V ships turn into gigantic televisions, broadcasting the first address of V leader Anna (Morena Baccarin from Firefly and Serenity)....

And how those that wielded them must have been disappointed. For while the film is no classic, thanks to a collection of problems we’ll come to shortly, it is a quite good telling of a really quite extraordinary story. It’s the first time we meet the character, although in lieu of backstory, we’re asked to assume that he hates Hitler, and wants to see him overthrown. It’s not the biggest leap of faith to make, but a bit more meat on his background wouldn’t hurt....

Vikings Season 4 Episode 5 And that’s why we love Lagertha. Though she’s been noticeably absent through much of the season, Earl Instad issues a powerful statement during the conclusion of last night’s episode of Vikings. After weeks of percolating plot points, things begin coming into sharper focus as the kingdoms wrestle with approaching storms, both internal and external. We’ve known for weeks that war looms on the horizon, but preparations have been ramped up on all sides with Paris sitting in the crosshairs of Ragnar and the Norsemen....

Vikings Season 4 Episode 11 “Who wants to be king?” Viewers are now asked to cope with the aftermath of a seven year time jump, and it’s obvious that some sort of course correction has taken place. Of course, the big question revolves around what has happened in the interim, and while we’ve known for some time that Ragnar’s struggle to maintain his leadership persona may have broken him, he again throws us for a loop with his impassioned speech in the village square....

Why won’t we be seeing Anthony Hopkins on Westworld this year? Very dead. Visibly rotting. Big ol’ hole in his face, filled with maggots and everything. OK that’s it for now! End of article! Catch you later. Actually, we should probably explore the implications of what Dr. Robert Ford’s death means. First it means that we won’t be treated to seeing the venerable Anthony Hopkins act every week. Hopkins did a wonderful job portraying such an inscrutable character but it sounds like the experience of operating within Westworld’s mystery-centric universe was a new challenge for him....

But just occasionally, it’s surely an appropriate way of dealing with the end of one story, and the start of another. For some reason, this news seemed to cause the Internet to melt down a bit for a while. And I’m a little puzzled as to how strong the feeling against the move was, and why. Because what exactly is Warner Bros supposed to do here? Firstly, it’s little secret that The Dark Knight Rises wraps up the story arcs that Christopher Nolan has woven into his two Batman films to date....

Certainly Cena-Shinsuke is somewhat of a dream match. I’m not sure hardcore wrestling fans — fans of the indie style — are going to go nuts over Shinsuke-Cena like they would Shinsuke-Styles, but this is still one of the biggest matches WWE can book at this point in time. Perhaps this move was made out of the struggling ratings, with the company looking for a boost. You could argue that they’ve misused Nakamura to a certain extent, and this could be a vehicle to get him back on track against the company’s biggest star....

Wynonna Earp Season 3, Episode 4 Wynonna Earp has always been pretty deft when it comes to genre. Sometimes, it’s a horror. Sometimes, it skews more supernatural. In tonight’s episode, “Colder Weather,” it leans heavy on the fairy tale formula. The trees literally have eyes, at least in new character Robin’s hallucinations, one of many hallucinatory experiences the characters on Wynonna Earp have throughout the episode, seemingly brought about by the impending arrival of a demon set to kill Waverly....

There was something awesome about the end credit song in an 80s movie. Think of all your favourite movies from that decade — Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, An Officer And A Gentleman — all end with songs that are almost as indelible as the movies they accompany. Nowadays, the form has died away (the last intentional example I can think of was the glorious throwback by Huey Lewis at the end of Pineapple Express)....

A few weeks ago we published a list of traumatic moments that have appeared in family films. Of course we all enjoyed that waltz through painful childhood nightmare fuel, but the question was raised, why not do a list of slightly more positive and upbeat movie scenes instead? Thus, this: 25 of the most triumphant movie moments of all time. Films can pull us out of that funk, give us that piece of much needed inspiration and generate that extra little boost we all sometimes need....

Adapted from his genuinely brilliant Oscar-nominated animated short of the same name, 9 is a film bursting with visual ideas, but completely lacking in the narrative department. Central to the story are little rag-doll creations called stitchpunks, who roam a ruined, post-apocalyptic wasteland brought about by a major war between man and machine. The film follows the story of #9 (Wood), the youngest of the stitchpunks, who wakes in the workshop of a deceased scientist, and ventures out in the wide world....

Some of us are great at conversation, and at drawing others out of their shell to share information about their lives. Others look for common interests, or practise small talk about the weather. Having said that, movie dialogue is often a bit overlooked. When reports come out of a film starting to shoot without a full script, it suggests that the words get less respect than they should. Although they might sometimes be the afterthought in the process, for millions of movie lovers they are the key to remembering a movie fondly, particularly when quotable phrases allow those memories to be enjoyed together....