Posts

Before it was published in novel form in 1860, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White was a forty-part magazine serialisation. Appearing weekly in the Charles Dickens-founded All The Year Round journal, Victorian readers gobbled up Laura and Marian’s Gothic tale as if it were a Superman comic. Kapow! Sir Percival’s plotting something! Zoom! Marian’s on the case! Smash! Count Fosco’s kidnapped Laura! Zoing! Biff! Boom! So it goes for part four of this adaptation, which, after spending the preceding hours gradually building a sense of dread, barrelled through a huge amount of story in one great rush....

This Is Us Season 2 Episode 4 We can prepare for predicted natural disasters like a snowstorm or do our best to shorten the time we suffer from the common cold once it has struck. However, we can’t prepare for unexpected family visits like Rebecca’s throwback to a Jim Crow era mother who has something to prove. Elizabeth McGovern turns in a solid performance as a Connecticut housewife and mother right out of a Douglas Sirk film....

And in a year that’s brought us Man Of Steel, Thor: The Dark World occasionally tries to go toe-to-toe in its desire to put across wholesale destruction on a cinema screen (albeit not in anywhere near as many prolonged doses, and this time with London in its crosshairs). Furthermore, lots more ingredients are thrown into the mix in the first half. With inevitable mention of The Avengers, and Thor’s failure to return to Jane after the end of the first film to deal with, Thor: The Dark World gamely tries to cover as much ground as it can....

Those factors, combined with Jack Kirby’s iconic (but arguably inappropriate) red, yellow and blue superhero-style costume make Thor an odd mish-mash of ideas, a hero who has been repeatedly reinvented since. Beginning in the desert of New Mexico, Thor opens with expert physicist, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), investigating an atmospheric disturbance with her team. No prizes for guessing which God of Thunder interrupts things by falling out of the sky....

This review contains spoilers. Written and directed by the multi-award-winning Sally Wainwright, the woman behind hits such as Happy Valley and Last Tango In Halifax, the tale of the famous Brontë sisters is a compelling drama of ambition and addiction. The ambition comes from the sisters themselves, determined to make a success of their work despite a society that would seek to silence them. The addiction is Branwell’s alone; his destructive behaviour casts a long shadow over the Brontës’ works, particularly Anne’s The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall and more famously, Emily’s Wuthering Heights....

The Blood Line Whatever you’ve thought of Torchwood: Miracle Day to date, you can’t argue with the fact that it threw pretty much everything it could find at you for its big, all-action finale. By turns utterly bananas, quiet, rug-pulling and head-scratching, it was an hour of television that provided and rounded off many of the promised answers. And then it left a whole new question. A big one, at that....

The Middle Men The first we’re introduced to, and perhaps the most ambiguous, is Stuart Owens, played by former Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson. He’s one of the middle men that the episode title hints at. He’s PhiCorp’s chief operating officer, who doesn’t seem comfortable with what the company he works for is up to, but as of yet, isn’t rocking the boat. At least, not too much. Still, when confronted by Captain Jack, Owens stays close to the fence....

On the one hand, it’s somewhat surprising that the two safely return to the hospital, though from a storytelling perspective it’s doubtful anyone would have suggested going to search for them even though they are most responsible for the pack still being alive. The episode’s title provides multiple layers of meaning, not the least of which implies that the hospital, for better or worse, has become home to the survivors....

Van Helsing Season 2 Episode 10 “You have a duty to do whatever you can with your God-given gift.” While the rest of the cast’s absence leaves a bit of a vacuum, the red ballooned opening scene announces a narrative shift that more than makes up for that deficiency. Certainly, the mountain retreat of BlakTek’s headquarters represents a refuge from the grit and grime of daily life below the clouds, but it also offers an alternative for Vanessa that makes sense given what she’s already learned along the way....

Vinyl season 1, episode 10 Richie Finestra is not all that likable a character. A lot of people probably turned off Vinyl show because of that. But he wasn’t designed for the kind of easy sympathy or empathy most TV watchers look for in prime time viewing. Finestra screws his enemies, he screws his friends, he screws his wife, he’s probably screwed his friends’ wives. But there’s something about him that has kept his office running and the workers, for the most part, loyal....

Fans were naturally upset at news of the show’s premature death, and creator Will Forte has been discussing where season 5 would have taken his band of survivors, via Vulture and Deadline. Forte planned for a few of these bunker peeps to be famous guest stars, as the series has done so brilliantly in past seasons. “Eventually we’d all get comfortable with each other. We are immune to the virus, but we’re carriers....

Additionally, I was going to strap on ice skates for the first time in five years, and to make matters even worse, I was on call at work, and helping out a friend at his business for part of the weekend. My workout time was going to be severely limited, and the temptations would be all around me. Could this possibly be my first week of failure? I’m also finding that my level of comfort with the Wii Fit software is growing....

The reason it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever when it comes to slashers – or, more accurately, good and bad – is because it’s so dependent on both formula (a lot of people will die) and exploitation (they’re going to die really horribly) that if at any point the filmmakers resort to cliche or cheap ways to get a rise out of you, it’s very easy for the film to feel grubby and cynical....

Can a film soundtrack rescue a movie that is otherwise a lost cause? One thing’s for sure: throughout the history of cinema, music has often been the redeeming feature of many an underwhelming movie. Here are 25 amazing film scores composed for films that, frankly, didn’t deserve them. 25) Meet Joe Black (Thomas Newman, 1998) This somnambulistic three hour romantic drama should really feature an extra screen credit for star Brad Pitt’s fetishised blonde locks....

While The Major has a great life, our hero Nick’s life is terrible. He’s a pizza delivery boy who spends all his time drinking beer and driving around in a battered, past-its-prime Mustang. He’s at odds with his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari), he’s going nowhere in life, and he’s pretty much miserable whenever he’s sober. Then, one day, a delivery goes horribly wrong and he finds himself wrapped up in Dwayne’s hair-brained scheme to knock off a bank to kill off The Major and get that inheritance that’s due him....

It’s been a long road for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. What was once a show that seemed a bit aimless and extraneous became a gripping, tense drama in the days since Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Characters who once seemed one note deepened and a show without villains has become the home to two pretty hateful sociopaths in Ward and Garrett (but stupid Quinn and his stupid haircut still stink)....

At the moment, there are two titles that can serve as a simple gateway into comics. Forget the obvious stuff like Watchmen and Sandman – as good as they are, they’ve long since become the comics (excuse me, graphic novels) that it’s “acceptable” for people to read, and an unfortunate side-effect of this exposure is that they often don’t bring people to comics so much as they bring people to Watchmen and Sandman....

Thunderbolts The problem, really, is that in order to work best, a movie would need recognisable villains, and those are mostly tied up with other franchises. Likewise, the big reveal of the debut issue of Thunderbolts – that the new team was actually composed of the Masters of Evil impersonating heroes – would be incredibly hard to pull off on film, especially if it was using a cast of otherwise unknown villains....

American Crime Story Episode 5 Uncle Tom accusations, a full-blown panic attack, and the most scathing line reading of “N—–, please”: The opening statements of the O.J. Simpson trial are cinematic even before we see Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne relaying all of the juicy details to his friends at a dinner party. “The Race Card” makes good on the promise that American Crime Story will thrill both viewers who lived through it and those who are too young....

Steve and his gang of outcasts are out hiking in the woods and come across a plane that has crashed. Onboard the plane, they find a dead man carrying the script for The Fast And Furious 7. Steve reads the script aloud to the gang. This is one of the funniest moments of the show. As a person who can’t stand the Fast and Furious franchise and thinks it is way over the top and an insult to movies, it is amusing to hear what Seth MacFarlane thinks the movie sounds like as a script....