Unfortunately for them and for the anarchist long-hair with a pool cue through his sternum, romance needs to take a timeout when murder gets in the way. And not just any murder, but a murder that gets stranger and more unbelievable as the episode advances. As you may have guessed, Will, the anarchist with the chest wound, isn’t merely the pool shark that he is said to be. As the episode unravels, clues begin to point to something strange....
Channel Zero: Butcher’s Block is based on the central concept of a series of anecdotes called “Search and Rescue Woods,” shared by Kerry Woods on a popular subreddit called “No Sleep.” Among the gruesome tales of the deaths of those the narrator and fellow SAR officers were too late to save is the mention of complete staircases often found miles from civilization in the middle of the woods. These eerily out-of-place stairwells have been transported to a vast city park in Antosca’s adaptation....
To set up the dire situation, we meet four friends, Chris (Jesse McCartney), big brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley), friend Amanda (Devin Kelley) and fellow travellers Michael (Nathan Phillips) and Zoe (Ingrid Bolso Berdal), as they go on a bit of ‘extreme tourism’ to Chernobyl. The film is unbelievably slow in getting to the point and, instead of spending precious minutes building the tension for later, we spend it in the company of six barely written and pretty annoying characters....
With this show now the proud owner of a shiny thirteen-episode season four, and an option on a back nine, those working on Chuck must be walking tall. If Chuck Versus The Living Dead is anything to go by, there appear to be those in the Chuck writing team who’d like the show to entirely morph into a serious spy drama. Because some bits of this week’s show were so Alias in places I wondered if Sydney Bristow herself would come gliding into view wearing an implausibly tight rubber dress and an outrageously red wig....
4.15 Chuck Versus The Cat Squad They threw in every Angels cliché they could, from the mix of personalities in the C.A.T. Squad, being blown up by an exploding car, to the wholesale ass kicking that everyone who meets them gets. The plot, for what it’s worth, is also exactly the sort of thing that was paraded in theseventies, where Chuck tries to reunite Sarah’s old team of the implausibly perky Amy, the seductive Carina, and feisty Zondra....
Cloak and Dagger Season 1, Episode 10 “I need to go help some people.” “Why you?” “Why not?” Too many superhero narratives work so hard to convince their viewers that their heroes are special. Tandy and Tyrone may have powers, but their strength comes from the things most of us have access to: emotional growth, the support of loved ones, the unwillingness to settle for an unjust world, and the tenacity to keep fighting....
Narratively, it centres on Anne Hathaway’s Gloria, who’s in a breaking relationship with Dan Stevens’ Tim. As they finally part, she moves from the lights of New York to her quiet and still home town, a homogenous place in middle America. It’s a small town that remembers Gloria in places, although Gloria’s own brain is struggling as a consequence of her drink problem. And so she rebuilds, very slowly. She soon finds herself reunited with Oscar, played by Jason Sudeikis in a career-best performance, a friend from her youth....
The film starts with Statham cruising around Europe (nowhere specifically, just Europe) listening to I Will Survive on repeat. He runs through a red light and then pulls over on a double yellow line. He hops out of his car, which is a black Ferrari-Porsche BMW mega-cruiser KY-Series 6.9. Very flash, indeed. He delivers a pizza to some house, but disappears inside, probably to get a tip or something. About forty minutes later he hops back into his car and heads home, driving just slightly over the speed limit the entire time, the bloody rascal....
1.2 Husbands And Fathers On the whole this episode was a lot less overwhelming than the last, probably partially because I knew what to expect. But in place of the previous episode’s thick, even layer of jadedness, Husbands and Fathers has tame stretches punctuated by some real punch-in-the-gut moments which make it momentarily even more appalling than last week. While episode 1 oozed an all-consuming desperation, episode 2 strikes fast and hard, biding its time until the most opportune moments....
Gould will have that dream realized when Stan Against Evil, his new series on IFC, debuts tonight at 10 p.m. Long before before he enlisted John C. McGinley to play Stan, a curmodgeon of an evil dead slayer, Gould was pitching a number of different television scripts. One of them in particular he held onto for awhile, and on a set visit over the summer, he admitted to us that he nearly struck gold before a genre TV boom....
Helpless Horror is the most gripping, visceral genre to have emerged in recent years, and we should be grateful for its broadening of the videogame canon, but for someone like me (and I’m saying this as a horror film fan) it is, in the teary words of Daylight‘s protagonist, “too much”. How can I really enjoy a game when I experience half of it through my peripheral vision for fear of facing my monstrous screen directly?...
1.10 The Bride Wore Black The story was a basic whodunit, for the murder of Kenya’s husband seven years previously. Though it was pretty obvious early on who was the most likely candidate, even if the writers very noticeably avoiding giving her a motive, while spreading them about to other characters so generously. The upside of this was that we got to see very different versions of Datak, Kenya and Tommy, long before Nolan turned up....
3.4 Dead Air Well, I said in my previous review that they’d need a new title sequence if the arch was blown up, and guess what? There’s a new title sequence. However, I’d back with hard cash that by the end of the season, by whatever means, the arch will be back and whole again. That said, it’s been half-fixed for more than two seasons, so it needed some serious corrective work or maybe a complete reconstruction....
1.1 Pilot And that was smack-dab in the middle of the George W. Bush Presidency, FFS. But I have to be honest: if there’s a reason why the series premiere of ABC’s Designated Survivor reminded me so much of Aaron Sorkin’s exemplary series, I think it’s because I’m not the only one who has been rewatching CJ, Josh, Toby, etc. solve the problems of running a contradictory and often tantrum-throwing country like the United States....
5.6 Everything Is Illumenated If last week’s story represented the synchronised ascent, with the clanking of the chain pulling a rollercoaster to the top of a steep incline, then episode six represented the influence of gravity accompanied by unrestrained shrieks of those strapped aboard the Dexter Express. When this show is having an average week, it’s good, but when it starts to gather the sort of pace that Everything Is Illumenated achieved, it becomes quite breathtakingly brilliant drama....
I was unable to get a copy of the omnibus edition I rented from a video shop in Hereford in 1994 for comparison, but certainly the picture quality here is as crisp as Quentin or Quavers. Blemish free, it’s never looked better, and it’s always looked good. Derek Martinus and his camera and editing crew throw in flourishes throughout, having fun in roomy locations with high angles and handheld cameras....
More than any other episode of the re-incarnated Time Lord’s adventures since 2005, Vincent And The Doctor is true to that early inspiration. How I love it for that, for its wide-eyed wonder and unashamedly emotional, sentimental, dénouement. Penned by none other than Richard Curtis (do I really have to explain? Oh, okay: Not The Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder I-IV, Bean, Notting Hill, Love Actually etc.) and directed by Johnny Campbell (Ashes To Ashes season 1 and Who‘s own The Vampires Of Venice) it’s a wholly pleasing, one could almost say life-affirming, non-sequitur for The Doctor and Amy as this thirteen episode series begins to wind up towards a finale....
Know what that is? That, my friends, is the sound of flabbergastedness. Kerblowee. After Blink being brilliant it was hard to see what could be pulled out of the bag to make the upcoming Saxon story interesting. Yawn, he’ll be the Master, and try and be prime minister, and ruin us all. Or something like that. But this episode, T Davies at his best, was all about the people. Throwing Jack back into the Tardis proves that three isn’t a crowd (apart from in the opening titles; they really need either two or four names for those rhythms to work, without a major 3/4 reworking)....
And this is the episode where it all slows down a little. Where Doctor Who starts to position itself for the second half of series 10. Where Steven Moffat returns on scripting duties, and lays down things that firmly keep the ethos of the series thus far in place, but also opens – no, stop looking for clues, because you ain’t getting spoilers here, no matter how hard you look – a few metaphorical things up....
