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India is a fascinating place and I've heard this was a fascinating book, but the plotline doesn't ring true, the dialogue is pretentious, laughably so at times, and just drags this series out. Charlie Hunnam's sing song Australian accent is odd and his character even less believable. To begin with, armed robber Lin (Hunnam) cradles dying cop in his arms instead of fleeing, his lawyer can get him off so he pleads guilty, then avoids certain death in Australian prison by escaping to India, where he tries to change his life and lie low by getting into street fights and hanging out with gangsters. So to assuage his guilt he lives in the slums where queues line up every day outside his shanty for doctoring because he was a paramedic. Sure. This is clearly fantasy not a true story, as I initially thought, and Lin is not the only unbelievable character. Head gangster Khaderbai talks like an intellectual philosopher and the underworld intrigue also stretches plausibility. There is enough suspense to keep you along for the rather slow ride but many of the scenes look shot on the lot instead of in India and tighter dialogue and plot could have made this a lot better.

I thought this movie looked a bit lame but my wife wanted to watch it. I was wrong. It was TOTALLY lame, but she liked it. Not much more to say ... what, another 440 characters? Make that 414. No 406. Wait ... OK, there were a few laughs, mostly the dog-child swap scenes and the bloopers, gotta love bloopers, but this is derivative formula with lots of preaching and heart-warming messages about the importance of family and getting along. We got the usual cliche - adults back in high school, children faking it hilariously (not) in the workplace, and 69 characters to go - but I wouldn't bother unle.

If your idea of "horror" is a bunch of Aussie blokes at the pub, then this could be your glass of chardonnay, but don't expect too many frights or insights. Outback schtick and implied threat are engaging enough for most of the movie but suspense goes nowhere and ends ludicrously.

This is not Wolf Creek but Wake in Fright with a feminist rewrite. Death to the patriarchy, alcohol, and all that but Royal Hotel is cliched 1950s social criticism with little new to say. We all know men are horrible, snakes are deadly, and if you must go outside the main cities in Australia, don't get out of your car. This is to tourism what cyanide is to fine dining.

Dead men start turning up in small town Tasmania forcing local plod (Kate Box) to investigate, despite moving to Tasmania with her wife for a quieter life, alongside a fly-in, foul-mouthed, crotch-scratching detective from the Northern Territory called Eddie, also a woman in this self-described feminist murder-mystery comedy.

Kate Box plays it straight as the only well-adjusted, intelligent character (because she's from Sydney?) while Eddie (Madeleine Sami) is a hyper-annoying, crude, pantomime parody of a hard-drinking, oversexed Top End bloke/woman. Eddie provides the main comedic focus of the series, which as many reviewers here point out, makes it almost unwatchable.

The creators claim this series gives marginalised people a voice, but apart from an Aboriginal family and lots of lesbians, it's mostly sledge-hammer humour making fun of obnoxious men, bogans, country towns and genitals. There are some funny moments and it also takes a swipe at gender politics and foodie arts festivals, or Feastival in this case, but the humour is often slapstick and reliant on four-letter laughs.

While the comedy can labour, it works as a murder-mystery if you ignore some character/plot issues. After a slow start it becomes a bingeable whodunit with a parade (though at times confusing surplus) of characters and murder suspects to keep you guessing, until the logic-defying ending that makes a joke of you taking it seriously.

Overall, overlong but if you survive the first cringe-worthy episodes, it's a half-decent comedy competing with a half-decent murder-mystery in need of stronger direction and script editing.

I love the first series. Nora as the slacker loser looking to get by and high, grandma is a scene stealer, the father pumping iron and looking for love, the stellar gay cousin - all great characters in a quirky take on Chinese family life and getting ahead in America with lots of laughs along the way.

The second season didn't match the first but, hey, still those great characters even though the plots started getting silly and the ideas barrel low. Less authenticity and laughs but still worth the ride.

The third season had a bigger budget but was so often ridiculous, moving away from gentle stoner humour to weird psychedelic self-indulgence, it was unwatchable. Now it is stalled due to the writers' strike, which tells you they didn't think this through and were just making it up as they went along, and boy doesn't it show.

This had a promising start as a potential mystery drama with the sister's disappearance, a feud over inheritance and a dysfunctional family who all seemed capable of murder but, no, this is simply a drawnout drama of guilt, grief, regret and unlikeable characters that goes nowhere. This series needed severe editing, starting with much of the dialogue and acting seemingly improvised on set, but big chunks like the Mardi Gras episode did nothing but drag this series out and should have been cut altogether. Even the casting was bad with what looked like 30 year olds playing children. I confess, my wife wanted to watch it so I was dragged along for the ride, which might explain my churlishness, but she also tired of it. Five stars from her, one from me.

I think this movie is so brilliant I had to write a grateful review, I was so touch and entertained. Daniel Craig is brilliant, the script just electrifying, and the the rest of the cast also put in such good performances. For me it was the Rogan Josh of movies - so satifying - and the cinematography was the naan, crisp and filling, and no I didn't get paid to write this review like so many other 10 star reviews that come out before a brilliant, satisfying movie is released. I just hope my parents, and my siblings and all my cousins have the opportunity to see this brilliant movie because it is.

Tarantino has a lot to answer for, but at least he can write dialogue, unlike most of the pointless prattle in this movie. Thomas the Tank philosophising might pitch to the mental age of the audience but is as trite as the the rest of the overlong banter between the cliched cockney Smoking Guns twins.

Throw in samurai swords, lots of guns, gangsters and guys, of course, and a couple of token evil gals, on a train, and you have yet another formulaic action movie trying to fill in the ridiculous plots holes with jokes. Brad Pitt's in-therapy character hangs it all together with some anger-therapy messaging that soon wears thin, for this is all about violence and stunts, and the lame plot takes a back seat.

I was one of the people sucked in by the Netflix promo that didn't tell us this was a spoof. When we find out the daughter had been eaten in prison by a serial killer, I thought this is ridiculous, but the woman was a hallucinatory alcoholic so, hey, maybe she is the killer and I'll hang in with some junk television to see the big reveal.

It wasn't until the final episode that the absurdities became so ridiculous I realised this was supposed to be a comedy.

Yeah, sorry, if you need to be told it's a comedy, it's not funny. I hate the Netflix app and its blaring promos, which have often led to disappointing shows. Now is a good time to cancel my subscription.

I'm in two minds on this movie. On the one hand it's a drawn-out, low-budget movie that can at times be amateurish if not downright silly (chef's fight club? Really?), on the other hand this is an original story of grief, love and longing with a detective plot that outweighs the flaws.

Nicholas Cage's screen presence pulls it all together, though talk of an Oscar is very optimistic. It's not like he needed a lot of range, or even lines, to play a taciturn, stone-faced, grief-crippled loner. But all credit to Cage, he does a fine job in a change-up role from the usual action schlock he does these days.

The plot is an odd mix of backwoods pioneer/city foodie/gangster/detective/porcine romance but all in all, an interesting, quirky, indie movie with moody, wet Oregan and Portland backdrops.

What was the budget on this film? Couldn't Disney afford to shoot real dog scenes? It just looked amateurish, some of the worst CGI I've seen, and they cheaped out on the soundtrack, too. If you can't afford original artists like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, maybe choose other songs rather than covers.

And what market was Disney aiming for? The family market, so let's watch a pack of dogs kill the mother? Shades of Kim Jong-il, look away kids.

That said, it has big movie spectacle moments with some decent action scenes, and the costume design is to die for, which pretty much sums up the lame plot. The two Emmas trying to out evil each other becomes tiresome after a while, while Cruella's two dumb but lovable sidekicks (usually played by mice or other cute Disney mammals) steal the show.

This is mindless, derivative escapism for big kids with nothing better to do, and I regret that I didn't have anything better to do. Definitely a lockdown movie, maybe worth 5 stars, but I've giving it one because 7.4 is just a ridiculous score for an juvenile melodrama.

Weird, very funny and original so why not more? Too original for the BBC?

This is by far the biggest disappointment of the year. I saw Christopher Nolan bagging the studio for releasing Tenet on HBO - he's lucky this movie made it anywhere near a cinema release. I'd be demanding my money back if I saw this in a cinema.

It's hard to know where to begin listing this film's failures. Dialogue is the main problem - hard to hear, but also far too much of it, trying to explain and build the silly, over-complicated plot line. They forgot the movie maxim: show don't tell, and the actors also struggle with their lines, particularly John David Washington who often looks as confused as the audience, and a miscast Kenneth Branagh is unconvincing as the Russian heavy. Only Elizabeth Debecki delivers any depth in her cliched damsel-in-distress role.

As for the plot, who knows what that was about, saving the world from Armageddon or something, wrapped in another time warp theme represented lamely by reversing the video. Only the exotic locales and action scenes, a la Bond but not as good, kept me watching, the only thing to justify that huge, wasted $205 mil budget.

This is a terrific document of late 1960s Los Angeles. Lots of street scenes from the beach to the hills, and traffic to die for - if only we had to compete with that number of cars these days.

Anouk Aimée is the big star, with big hair and French insouciance, but Gary Lockwood is the real beauty here. Shame about his wooden acting, though his character is going to Vietnam to die, so perhaps he can be forgiven for the lack of emotion, and he has some cool 1960s friends to sponge from.

This is 1960s euro-nihilism in America, and while it doesn't hit the heights of great cinema, it's a cool reflection of the times.

I was hoping to learn something about Japan and I'm a sucker for a travel series, but Japan takes a back seat to the presenter and his zany, nerdy, staged adventures from samurai boot camp to mascot cosplay. Every cliche is trotted out here - robot hotels, geisha, bullet trains, eating blowfish, etc. - but that's OK, give me more of that and less of the host hamming it up. A must for fans of Rhys Darby (he must be big in New Zealand) but I could only take two episodes, and I fast forwarded through most of the second one.

Saw the promo, watched the first five minutes and thought these autistic twins are fascinating, but their feats of memory turned out to be limited in this a B-grade documentary, but their manipulation as media freaks became a much more interesting untold story crying out for a follow-up.

Premise: a TV reporter in Florida "discovers" autistic twins with extraordinary memories and turns them into celebrities, not in a cruel way like Letterman, but nonetheless he cashes in on the fame of the Rain Man movie and promotes these gentle, likeable sisters in a series of news stories as savants, or geniuses with gifted mental abilities despite their disability.

They do have extraordinary memories based on their obsessions, but being able to name the day of the week for any date is fairly easy mental arithmetic if you can be bothered to learn the formula, and memorizing a limited period of 70s popular music or what TV presenters wore on any given day is less genius than obsession.

Where this documentary enters a very gray area is the twins' "worship" of Dick Clark, whose game show was another of their obsessions. The TV reporter takes them to visit Clark in episodes of their lives, but the documentary crew elevates it to a whole new level, filming the women on the Hollywood hall of fame, where they visit his "shrine" (the narrator's word not theirs). When they kneel at Clark's star, and profess love for their "savior", it's pretty obvious this is at the direction of the film crew, and this manipulative piece of television starts to fall apart and becomes more than just a little creepy.

Alex Garland has always been an interesting writer and director, from The Beach to Ex Machina and Annihilation, and his venture into TV does not disappoint. In this sci fi series, the science is futuristic but the time is now, when a Russian tech whiz is invited into a Big Data company's inner sanctum to work on its secretive Devs program. When he disappears, his Chinese girlfriend (Sonoya Mizuno) is dragged into a world of spies and cover-up overseen by an ex-CIA security head (Zach Grenier) and a laid-back, pony-tailed CEO tech messiah (Nick Offerman).

The opening episodes have plenty of intrigue and action to drag you in, even if Offerman's xanax-inpsired dialogue gets annoying after a while, though the same can be said of most of the characters. Just as the tension and mystery builds to a head, it slows to a crawl, especially episode 6, devoted entirely to explaining the slightly preposterous pre-determinist science behind Devs.

This looks like a movie script drawn out into an overlong TV series that needs editing, but despite the flaws there's plenty of intrigue to keep you hooked. This thought-provoking, intelligent sci-fi adventure is a cut above the pack and well worth the ride.

OMG, Joaquin Phoenix lost so much weight his shoulders pop, he laughs hysterically, and he can't dance. Acting genius! Give him an Oscar. This is the best movie since the last gory psycho killer movie I saw, and I just loved the blood spatter, er, I mean, this is an important exploration of mental illness and a damning indictment of society's failure to understand comic book villains.

Two stars for this overrated, pretentious revenge pic, mostly for De Niro's portrayal of a smug TV host (surely a reference to Letterman) who cynically exploits the painfully untalented for audience amusement and derision.

Here we go again, Tarantino rewriting history because, well, he got away with it in his silly reimagining of WWII in Goriest Barsterds, so why not do it again with this pointless retelling of the Manson murders. Mercifully, fewer people get slaughtered this time, but it's the same revenge theme glorifying violence - pick the most evil people you can find like Nazis, slavers, or in this case hippy cult killers so audiences will cheer their murders.

This time the bad guys are mainly girls, the evil Manson women, with Charles Manson making only a brief appearance. I've read that this is a dig at the MeToo movement, in which case Tarantino should keep his misogynist musings to himself, and you'll understand why when you see the ludicrous, sick ending. Tarantino has always had difficulty portraying women, who are mostly evil or dumb in this movie, but then this is a macho buddy pic, highlighting 1960s cliches and Hollywood buddy love between Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, who is so macho he gets to beat up Bruce Lee, for what reason other than dragging down the memory of a screen icon, I don't know.

Apart from the ludicrous ending (the scene with the flamethrower was so juvenile as to be unintentionally hilarious) we are treated to plenty of drawnout scenes that go nowhere. Like the filming of a TV western, as long as an actual TV episode, or the Spahn Ranch scene that takes forever to build tension only to fizzle out to nothing. It seems to have been included only to give Bruce Dern a cameo, like the Steve McQueen (Damien Lewis) cameo, which is poorly backlit to aid the illusion and serves no other purpose than to deliver a clumsy plot explanation. Then there's long scenes of Pitt driving around LA to music just so more songs could be included on the lackluster 1960s soundtrack (seriously, couldn't they afford better songs?) or to drive past 60s movie posters on every street corner.

Is all this labored film-nerdom referencing the 1960s and Tarantino's own movies supposed to be clever? There's no doubt Tarantino can direct and create scenes from other movies/ genres, and spin them into appealing floss, but it's sugary empty macho floss that will rot your brain with gratuitous violence. I can see how this movie appeals to old film critics who get the film references and remember the 1960s, but this movie needed severe editing and a coherent script.

This show is hilarious and a great foil to the palace press barrage that the media regurgitates mindlessly, summed up beautifully by my favourite line of the series from Will (or is it Harry, they all sound the same to me): "I love riding around on bicycles, wearing chinos and jumpers, and pretending to be like ordinary people."

This is a merciless portrayal of the royals as a bunch of airheads, albeit mostly good-natured,but when your only real talent is being born (or marrying) into the right family, perhaps it's not that far off the mark. I'd like to say this is political satire at its best, skewering an anachronism that only undermines modern democracy, but really it's just making fun of a musty institution and its all-too-public characters. The impersonations are spot on and the irreverence is delicious.

The last thing the world needs is more lawyers, or TV shows about them. Lawyers are among the most boring people on the planet but this main character (Jimmy McGill/Saul) is interesting because he's unlike any other TV lawyer we've seen – he's a lying conniving shyster, a petty conman with highly fluid morals, yet with a heart of gold and a genuine affection for people. Even if his character contradictions are not quite believable, there's enough charm to keep us along for the ride, but this show has become bogged down in his attempts to establish a legal practice and stay on the straight and narrow.

Far too much of the show is taken up with the daily grind of competing law firms. Meanwhile, there's a great counter plot involving Mexican drug cartels and an ex-cop/parking lot attendant/freelance troublemaker that we know is eventually going to explode and collide with Jimmy, because we've seen it in Breaking Bad. But there is far too little of that and far too much legal tedium as the show's creators drag out any suspense to the point of boredom.

This has got to be the slowest TV series I have watched, with constant flashbacks and increasingly pointless scenes that tell us what we already know, as the producers milk this series for as long as they can. The first series was great. I give it an 8 even if not much happened, but the second series just got bogged down (6), and the third series was more of the same (5).

This is smart drama, cleverly intercutting different plot lines, and the camera-work is always dazzling, from extreme closeups to aerial shots, great desert scenery and unusual camera angles, but I have persevered far too long and it's time to get on with the action or wrap this series up.

Maybe one day they'll release a director's cut that is actually shorter, not longer, for this could be a terrific single-series drama, but if you're thinking of watching the whole thing, I'd say don't bother. I've lost interest and won't sit through any more silly plot contrivances, like so much of the third series, designed just to keep this series going for as long as possible.

A big fan of the original movie, which saw Jacki Weaver nominated for an Oscar as the scheming, ruthless mother of a violent criminal family, I had to watch this series. It lacks the gritty reality of the movie, recasting lowlife criminals as Californication aspirationals, complete with beachside real estate, pools, expensive cars, drugs and easy sex because, hey, this is America where even the criminal make it.

Yeah, sure, but putting Hollywood formula and plausibility aside, it makes up for it with good characterization and tight scripts that ratchet up the suspense. Ellen Barkin does a great job reprising the mother role (Smurf), and Shawn Hatosy as the menacing, psychopathic son Pope is the other standout, though all the cast do a good job. The first series is gripping, with lots of plot threads that mostly tie off nicely come the finale but leave you hankering for more.

It remains to be seen how the second season will go. So far it seems to be much of the same – more robberies that go wrong, or almost, more family tension, more scheming and menace, but as the characters become more human and likable (even Pope), it's hard to see how to ratchet up the suspense. I guess eventually the characters will be put before a test audience and killed off or jailed one by one, with Smurf in a final ratings blaze of gunfire with police, if it ever gets that far. I suspect my interest will fail as the series proceeds unless they pull out the stops, tone down the glorification, ratchet up the violence, and this lowlife crime family gets what it deserves.

What was De Niro thinking? Has he no pride left? Will he appear in anything, do any movie for a buck?

Don't get me wrong. I've got no problems with raunchy. I loved Bad Santa, got some real laughs from Johnny Knoxville's far-funnier Bad Grandpa, but this is just lame, unfunny, derivative, poorly scripted studio slop

The basic premise is: boring uptight young lawyer, a week before his marriage to an obnoxious woman, is forced to go on a road trip with his obnoxious grandfather - sorry, lecherous but oh-so hilarious grandfather. On the way they bump into love-interest girl from the grandson's college days, back when he was an interesting arty photography student.

Get where this is going? And it doesn't diverge off track one bit, with 1950s studio formula joined by hangover/bridesmaid/current comedy cliché. But the jokes just fall flat. Note to writers: being crude doesn't automatically make it funny, it's the setup that makes comedy. Simply using the V-word isn't funny unless the context makes it so. Ditto showing a penis - the latest must-have in every me-too American adult (read juvenile) comedy right now.

But it just gets worse and worse. We've got the Apatow riffing from two cops, making it up as they go along, going on and on and on in unfunny scenes that are just tedious. The script then disintegrates into inanity, not even bothering to pay lip service to logic. But, hey, Grandpa is really a good guy, because he killed Iraqis or something, so that makes his obnoxious behavior OK?

Dumb, lame, juvenile - I'm running out of adjectives, just as this script ran out of credibility after 15 minutes, if indeed there was a script, because there certainly wasn't any new ideas or real laughs.

What would happen if you held Tarantino down on the floor, blew his head off with a shotgun and watched it disappear in a wall splatter? You'd get this movie. This recycled blaxploitation revenge western, which was just like the last bounty-hunter n-word revenge pic, same same but different, but twice as long, twice as boring, and just like the revenge movie before that, the Nazi one, but less people died this time...

OK, anyway, this TV movie (except episodes are called "chapters", ooh, that's so literary high brow) has been released in a retro 70s-film format that means nothing to me or relieves the tediousness of lots of people getting blown away with guns, but the snow photography looks nice until it is set in a studio-set cabin with lots of boring dialogue from clichéd characters no-one cares about because, well, they're all boring psychopaths, like all Tarantino characters.

Anyway, finally, after all that boring dialogue, they shoot the guts out of each other, like every other Tarantino movie. But wait, I forgot, there's a woman psychopath in this one, because as we all know, honey bunny, Tarantino understands and portrays women with unrivalled depth and nuance. Punch her in the face, cover her in gore, and give her an Oscar. Quentin is a genius!

And that's the end, hopefully, and we won't have to watch another juvenile Tarantino movie, desperately hoping for the originality of Pulp Fiction, but left with just another tedious, blood drenched, revenge themed genre remake.

I've been a big fan of the Chaser and their irreverent humour over the years, but the boys are looking old and tired with this one. I persevered with the first series, but rarely switch on for the second.

This a current affairs panel show - on a couch, which does nothing for the format - featuring journos that look uncomfortable, and unknown comics trying to outdo each other with smug cynicism. It hones in on the same old targets like Karl Stefanovic and Bill Shorten, but even Shorten is more popular than this bunch. Some of the media clips are funny but for current affairs comedy, Have You Been Paying Attention, despite its shameless commercialism, has more laughs per episode than Media Circus has had all series.

Let's hope a third series is not in the wings, and the Chaser team is forced to delve into their talent banks to come up with something more original.