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This review contains spoilers. After last week’s strong start, the fourth series continues with another engrossing case that sees Morse and his colleagues confronted by 60s counterculture and its vociferous opponents. The arrival of trendy band The Wildwood in Oxford attracts a lot of press, as does a visit by moral campaigner Joy Pettybon (Sylvestra Le Touzel). The long-haired heartthrobs are just the type of dope-smoking, free-loving hippies she loathes, and an appearance on TV show Almanac looks set to fan the flames of controversy....

Ex Machina, the directorial debut from novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd), owes a great deal to Alan Turing. For one thing, its premise is directly inspired by what we now call the Turing Test – his suggestion that, if a machine were sophisticated into fooling someone communicating with it into believing that it could think and reason, then it really could think and reason....

What Hides Beneath Normally, I’d consider it a spoiler to reveal such big information in the first paragraph of a review, but people have been saying it all along, some even in review comments (and the reviews are marked with spoiler warnings, in case you haven’t seen the episode yet), so it’s unsurprising when a skitter autopsy reveals a collar, or when the big bads of the alien world (some giant gray style aliens) show up....

2.1 Worlds Apart & 2.2 Shall We Meet At The River Of course, the last time people returned from alien custody, one of them turned into an asset and the other turned into a serious problem for the group. Will Tom end up being more like his son Ben (Connor Jessup) or more like the traitor Rick? That’s the big question for the group, and that question only grows tougher to answer when Tom starts spasming and bleeding from the eyeball thanks to a little, ahem… gift left him by the aliens who captured him, then let him run away free in Lansing, Michigan....

5.4 Pope Breaks Bad The weak link in the Second Mass is, as always, John Pope. He came to the group as a prisoner, was happiest as a guy running his own little town of misfits or his own troop of berserkers, and when he’s given an order, he’ll do it, but he’ll do it his way (or for a fitting bribe). Not so much anymore. Pope, along with the disgruntled Anthony, are spreading the seeds of dissent among the group, and Pope appears to be gathering a good amount of bearded support goons while Tom is off gathering much-needed vehicles and supplies to use in the war effort....

Falling Water Season 1, Episode 3 If the focus were solely on Burton with the others relegated to B-stories, the intrigue related to the unscrupulous firm he works for might be enough to sustain audience interest on its own without the distractions from the other threads. Presumably, the Topeka initiative (or group or whatever) is tapping into the collective unconscious to predict markets or even manipulate world events. Or something bigger!...

2.8 Loplop As forms of denial go, it’s rather handy. Peggy’s mental distancing from the reality of her situation enable her to do things that she wouldn’t otherwise do – stabbing the bound Dodd for instance – that convince her captive that she’s crazy and helping to sustain her position long enough for it to become really dangerous. Peggy has been a difficult character to like. Her earliest appearances showed her as a manipulative figure, whose marital unhappiness manifested itself in the calculated mistreatment of her husband, himself a miserable figure whose limited desires never fully coalesced with hers....

1.4 – Not Fade Away Things seem to be going on fairly normally in Nick Clark’s neighborhood. His stepfather Travis is out for a run, waving at neighbours and getting up a good sweat. His stepbrother Chris is perched on the roof making videos of the slow death of the world around them. Meanwhile, he’s floating in a pool, soaking up a little sun and enjoying the feeling of stolen morphine in his veins....

2.12 Pillar Of Salt There’s an interesting phenomenon at play in Fear The Walking Dead. It feels like our characters are hundreds of miles apart, right? Nick’s in his world, Maddie and Alicia are in their world, Travis and Chris are in their world, and Ofelia is streaking through the desert in a stolen pick-up truck looking for gasoline to siphon, right? Well, yes and no. Once upon a time, most people lived and died within a very small radius of the place where they were born....

Fear The Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 13 Since the introduction of its new villain a few episodes back, I’ve bemoaned Fear The Walking Dead’s conspicuous absence of common decency. “Blackjack” looks to remedy this on two fronts, first by bringing back the preternaturally optimistic and lovelorn John Dorie. And second, and perhaps more importantly, by finally giving Luciana a real purpose in this latter half of the season. The success of this episode hinges not so much on kindness as it does on happenstance—and a lot of it at that....

Fear The Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 5 Based on previews alone, I wasn’t excited about “Laura,” which is a flashback episode in a season already full of time jumps. This is also a bottle episode, which can yield mixed results on any series. That “Laura” begins with a singing bass alarm clock also gave me serious pause. So, yes, in a season that spends so much time looking back, yet another flashback may seem as superfluous as an appendix....

‘You think you know fashion Well, fashion’s a stranger You think fashion’s your friend My friend, fashion is danger’ The episode opened with Bret and Jemaine performing to a small audience. There’s one person with shopping bags there at the beginning, but he wasn’t there when they finished. It also transpires that Murray wasn’t there for the set either, as he disappeared to do some shopping. Drastic measures need to be taken so Murray calls a band meeting to address his concerns....

1.4 The Art Of Murder That said, this week’s Forever pretty much justified me picking this one to cover, as it marked a very distinctive change of pace and purpose in what was becoming something horribly predictable. It begins in typical Murder She Wrote fashion, with an elderly socialite being stalked through the darkened corridors of a grand art gallery. Kathleen Chalfant (Kinsey, Perfect Stranger) plays the wonderfully irascible Gloria Carlyle, who tells everyone what she really thinks of them before meeting her unexpectedly violent death....

Cold. What is cold? Strictly speaking, it’s a reduction in thermodynamic energy, the slowing of fundamental particles. Slide far enough down the temperature scale and everything stops moving, even atoms. You don’t need to chill things by quite that much to notice a deadening of action. Cold slows. Cold kills. And cold preserves. All of these actions are present as we enter the second episode of Fortitude, where, assuming the suggestion that it’s a proxy for Svalbard, the average annual temperature is -5 degrees centigrade....

Morris is a man who’s no stranger to controversy, with his Brass Eye programmes in the 90s still loved and loathed in sizeable quantities by certain segments of the audience. He recounts in the Q&A for Four Lions a story of his reading about a tale of a plot to ram a US warship by a terrorist cell. They loaded up their boat with explosives, only for it to instantly sink....

Fringe is often short on explanations, keen to move forwards rather than backwards. So Peter is something of a major diversion, as it sets out in one story to totally explain Peter’s origins, and a good many other things in a single stroke. For those who aren’t show regulars, they’ll be wondering what this is all about, but to Fringe fans it’s something of a gift, filling in many gaps in our understanding of the Bishops and their very personal tragedy....

This review contains spoilers. Having watched this episode for the second time, I’m still trying to work out if it was a stroke of insanity or brilliance. The best description I can come up with was that it was like we’d glimpsed an episode of Fringe from another dimension, one that didn’t exactly follow the same basic rules as the one we’re used to. But when the show’s three creators, J....

Fun Size is disappointing all the way through – infuriating at certain points, but sweet and snarky at others. It’s a mish-mash of good ideas and bad execution fighting it out, and the film comes off just a bit little odd as a result. Hilarity and hijinks ensue throughout the night, and the prospect of a missing child is never offered the gravity it might deserve. Paedophile gags and the repeated kidnapping of a mute eight-year-old child are glossed over in a steadfastly light-hearted way, as if the film is determined to bring the risqué humour but unwilling to properly follow it up....

3.6 The Climb There’s something to be said for many of Alik Sakharov’s choices as the director. As a pretty accomplished cinematographer, he’s got a good sense of visuals, and that shows through in some of the framing choices he makes this week. The Riverrun negotiation scene between the representatives of the Freys and Robb Stark’s inner council makes great use of natural light and windows, and there are also some very clever transitions (for instance, the focus shift from the garden to the balcony overlooking the garden)....

Gotham Season 2, Episode 22 Gothamended season 2 by upping the irrationality factor — which is saying something for a show that has characters blowing up characters with bazookas in a “normal” episode. The season finale saw this show buckling under the weight of its own big picture moments, making its characters act especially stupid to maintain the latest zonky premises just a little bit longer. I want to blame the doppelgangers, but it’s not like this show didn’t already have a plot twist addiction before it started introducing doubles of the show’s main characters....