Film and TV

DVD: Line of Duty (Series 3) (2016) In an age of Netflix and serial binge watching of TV shows, waiting week on week for the next episode of BBC 2’s ‘Line of Duty’ has been tortuous. With character arcs as wide as Breaking Bad and a story that goes as deep as Vicky McClure’s DC […]

Blu-ray: 1900 (Novecento) (1976) Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novecento) is a sprawling 317 minute movie that covers seventy years of Italian social and political history, from 1901, the year Verdi died and peasants were still in bondage to the landowners, to the 1970’s. Novecento follows the lives of two Italian men born on the same day […]

DVD: Tour of Duty (2015) Major John Cafferty (Tahmoh Penikett) wakes up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there or what happened to him and his team in their last mission in Afghanistan. The other members of his squad are just as confused and it’s not long before they begin to […]

Blu-ray: Bride of Re-Animator (1989) Eight months after the massacre at Miskatonic, we find Doctors Herbert West and Dan Cain working as medics in the middle of a civil war in Peru. It’s obvious from the start that West is up to his old ‘Re-animating the dead’ tricks again, and it’s not long until they’re […]

Blu-ray: The Ninth Configuration (1980) As a fan of film, on occasion a review copy Blu-ray will plop on my mat, and on opening it I will sigh and think ‘Oh fuck, here we go’. It’s not a resigned sigh or even a horrified exhale, but rather a ‘how can I possibly write a critical piece about […]

Streaming: The Hunted (2015) Created by Robert Chapin, The Hunted began life in 2001 as an online web series and continues to this day, making it one of, if not THE, longest running online series. It has built an international audience and is fuelled by user generated content which gives each episode its own identity, while […]

Blu-ray: The Life of Rock with Brian Pern (2014-) I will always be eternally grateful to Brian Pern for discovering Kate Bush. Written by BAFTA nominated and Emmy Award winning director/writer Rhys Thomas and The Fast Show’s Simon Day, ‘The Life of Rock with Brian Pern’ follows the ‘story’ of the eponymous singer/songwriter/Rock God, his band THOTCH and associated muscians, […]

Blu-ray: Three Days of the Condor (1975) The 1970’s, home of the conspiracy thriller (want a list? Here’s a few to jog your memory; The Parallax View, Chinatown, Capricorn One, Klute, The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor, whose reputation precedes it as one of the essential paranoia films of 1970’s. Robert Redford plays […]

Blu-ray: Eureka (1983) Performance, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now and Masters of Cinema’s new release of ‘Eureka‘ are all films by Nicolas Roeg. I would expect any film fan to have heard of the first 4 and probably hold those films in very high regard. I’ve read about Eureka but […]

Cinema: Review: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) At time of writing this review Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has an average rating of 44 on Metacritic and a fairly pathetic 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. I find myself asking a few questions with the first being; are critics out of touch with the general […]