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I'm no Filoni worshipper but I rather liked the refreshing brevity and continuity curiosity of 2022's Tales of the Jedi. This follow-up is... far less interesting and I'd hardly say The Mandalorian's Morgan Elsbeth and Clone Wars minor character Barriss Offee are of the same stature as Ahsoka and Dooku. Not only that but neither of them are particularly Empire-tastic. More... Empire adjacent. That being said, I still do like the shortness of the episodes, but it all feels very throwaway and more of an afterthought than a project in its own right or even a continuation of the first set of stories.

Alongside Guardians Black Panther might have licence to call itself the strongest bit of world-building in the MCU. Wakanda is almost the lead character and there's a real sense of place here, but that's not to diminish the charismatic Boseman and the bewilderingly vast roster of likable supporting characters. It's one of the strongest stand-alone films the studio has come out with and the subtle layering of the plot is fairly unmatched. All that, and the grieving, and its status as a pivotal "pop culture moment", marks it as a modern classic of the genre. The only thing that lets it down in this Brit's eyes is the (thematically necessary) sickly monarchism at the core of it all.

A serious let-down after a surprisingly affecting original film, and has become rightly derided in the long years since for getting so much wrong in its sketchy pastiche of what the internet actually is and does. It functions tolerably to start with but as a sequel it's a very poor effort, abandoning a lot of the ensemble cast that made the first so good and even the central arcade setting itself. I kept feeling like the real plot should have been about how the arcade itself adapts to the change the internet would bring to it, rather than what amounts to a bloated "Toy Story Toons" style side-escapade crammed with loads of cringey forlock-tugging cameos for corporate backslaps. Grim.

I re-watched this recently and I was worried it wouldn't hold up but it remains one of the goriest, silliest and most bombastic horror comedy TV series ever made. By resurrecting Ashy Slashy as a middle-aged loser he seems far more likeable than he appeared on film and the ensemble cast is dynamite. In particular the central trio of El Jefe, Pablo and Kelly - who roll through the brief three series with real gusto and bolstered by a sincerely fantastic soundtrack. Could it have gone on longer? Of course, but the ending is so extraordinarily gutsy you can't fault it. If this is really the last we ever see of our chainsaw wielding hero then it's a fine final hurrah.

The only downside to this remarkable last gasp of the Planet series before things really started changing is the end credit music, which is appalling. I love a nature doc with a central theme and dedicating each episode to a different continent is a great shout and gives a really nice geographic focus, especially with sections about geological formations and the like which hark right back to the earliest ever Planet Earth in the mists of time. The sea-floor carpet of Antarctic flora is especially evocative in the first episode and we've taken to regularly revisiting the hamsters-in-the-graveyard sequence from the Europe episode. This is easily one of my favourite of the latter day Planet series and I'm even willing to forgive it them there terrible credit noises.

After re-watching the brilliant original Jaws but never seen the largely disliked the series, I thought I'd probe the murky waters of Jaws 2. What's most shocking about it is that it sort of functions, and I think as a standalone work it probably wouldn't be badly regarded but the weight of the original sinks it as well as a failure to really characterize any of the 9000 central teens. I also became obsessed with how different it would be if we really didn't know if the chief was traumatised and delusional about the shark returning right up until the third act, but that's not the kind of film they had in mind. Which is ... you know... an interesting one.

I saw this over ten years ago and oh boy... has the central impression this film makes altered immeasurably since then. Wrapped in a deeply dated vaudevillian foolishness and a gawky love plot the central message still has this stark power that feels even more impactful in these dark days. It's a deeply humanitarian sort of work and it's belittling treatment of those who'd rush in to fight is undermined by a baggy to-and-fro farce structure and a few too many silly sight gags. I love the murderous energy of the central lad and it's glorious to see a young Alan Arkin & Carl Reiner playing off one another but is really far too long.

You can always rely on Boots Riley to hoof out something profoundly weird and I'm a Virgo is no exception to this. A meditation on superheroics, corporate culture and trueness to whatever one's self is - chock full of bizarre allegorical imagery and fascinating ideas. It's an art thing. Feels very art. In that, as a narrative, it's a little lacking. Its intentional metaphorics make it come across as fairly aloof and the deep message being presented on the most corporate television platform there is feels sadder than the trollish win it's painted as in some quarters. That being said, I feel like this endeavour may end up outliving the endless turgid cape crusades from the rival corporations, and the more cynical ones of the same network.

I didn't have many reservations finally delving into the MCU spiderverse and miraculously Homecoming proved pretty solid. There are the usual Disney Marvel quibbles of course - Marisa To-May feels hugely underwritten and is about forty minutes too long - but there's a really nice low stakes in Homecoming that feel particularly refreshing. The film never loses sight of Peter's student side and when Keaton re-enters the narrative the tension is legitimately dynamite. I found I didn't mind this version of Spidey being so reliant on Stark, and it felt a far more thoughtful introduction than a lot of new characters get. That and the tremendously clever casting of the likeable Holland makes this one of the stronger Spidey films.

The third resurgence of the Gladiators franchise was both a surprise hit in the UK in the early parts of 2024 but also my household. More than just 90s nostalgia it brought back fond memories of foolish American physicality vehicle "Ultimate Tag" and we were instantly invested. Filmed in Sheffield arena and with a slew of new younger gladiators (highlights being the one-who-always-understands-the-assignment Legend and the perennially endearing Fury) the only real flaw is the decision to rely on father-and-son presenting team the Walshes. Bradley has the gift of the gab and Barney is a 2D cut-out of a man. Here's hoping another series brings some changes and breaks up the repetition of repeated games a bit, because I'll always have fond memories of this first one.

Palin's latest series, each one feels like a baffling gift, sees him newly widowed and arriving discombobulated into the sprawling waterlogged slums of Lagos. It's an ominous start but he regains his energy fast and is back in step after that. Nigeria is a fascinating country to focus on and his relentless humanity is on show as always here, despite his increasingly large entourage of minders, guards and fixers. Again it's more of a whistle-stop tour than his epic journeys of old and you get the feeling he's only really scratching the surface of such a vast and complex country, but there are enough fascinating encounters and strange asides to keep it interesting. Where next? Slough?! Hopefully just Slough.

Pink Panther Odyssey Part XXXVIII

You know what, I'm beginning to have serious respect for the few Pink Panther shorts that have titles that are so bafflingly divorced from the content of the cartoon. As someone who comes up with review titles for loads of IMDb reviews that no one is ever going to read: it's a craft. A deeply underrated craft. Now I'm not going to do something extraordinarily crafty like go on to make this review nothing to do with the actual content of the cartoon itself. That would take a far smarter person than I am. I'm just someone who writes loads of superfluous reviews on IMDb for no reason.

It's hard to know where to start with this... much like Deep Impact and Armageddon of old we had two projects release at once about the same thing. I plumped with Prime and you get three fairly aimless episodes of Alice Hines making a bit of a "quest" out of exposing these two awful frauds. What they preside over and their general personalities are enough for interesting telly but as we drifted towards a conclusion I did start to wonder how manipulative this sort of trashy little PrimeDoc itself was. There's a lot of reconstruction stuff which always feels leading, the way it made out like the central figure was dead the whole time and bits of it which focussed on the family & friends of Super Jesus and make-up lady were quite uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. I mean the consequences of what they do are genuinely very serious and it feels like this wasn't... really helping.

Mae arrives on Netflix with a characteristically understated live special, with only a sort of semi-meta bit of bumpering with the great Phil Burgers (also in Feel Good) as adornment. I think the direction was similarly bare bones but the material was solid and Mae is so effortlessly charismatic, with their slightly-overwhelmed-to-even-be-speaking-in-public vibe. The comedy is a niche sort of vibe tonally and strikes a strange place between introspective tangents of tremendous earnestness and stabs of surreal bluntitude. Whether they nail "the big message" or not is neither here nor there, this is them fairly unvarnished and I can dig it.

Having spent years avoiding these gigantic MCU milestones it's fascinating for me that it's this "set-up" film that is far superior to the actual finale. Infinity War is just this hugely extended actual ... living comic. Full of melodrama, big punch-ups, this big devastating finale and great character moments. It's almost terrifyingly overstuffed and the Wakanda climax feels a little tacked-on and clumsy but I was dizzy with glee throughout. Also even though I'm well-past knowing the full ins-and-outs of the finale it still had this absurdly harrowing quality and I cannot imagine the impact it had at the time. The best Avengers film, I shouldn't have waited!

The strangest feeling overcame me when I saw The Terminator again and that is between seeing it last (perhaps in the 2000s) and now it's gone from being an "old" film to being a "period" film. In fact, like a lot of time travel films, it acts as a perfect time capsule. It feels so thoroughly intoxicatingly 1984 that it's actually quite overwhelming. The cheapy budget gives it this sickly late-night wash which works in it's favour but the thin synth soundtrack hasn't fared so well. It's goes at a great relentlessly linear pace and Linda Hamilton's evergreen Sarah Connor is seriously well-rounded for the time. Apart from... that scene which feels out of another film all together. Still - it's a convincing core of one of the most evocative "old" or "period" sci-fi franchises of the last few decades.

The big iron daddy of the semi-modern era of giganto-blockbusters. Titanic was a cultural phenomenon that I was alive to witness and absorbed a fair clutter of it just through breathing. What really shocked me about watching it in 2024 was how solid it actually is as a film and how much it still stands up technically. The entire sinkening is brutally paced and the scale of the sets is extraordinary but what the whole thing hangs on, the lost love of an old woman, genuinely is deftly done and makes it quite compelling despite the runtime. Fair play to it for that and it's certainly a great deal more compelling as a story than anything in Cameron's latter blue-bloato-megabusters. That being said, the music is extremely dated, our two leads say eachother's names more than any other thing and the whole endeavour is all a bit Julian Fellowes. Despite all this, it sincerely doesn't feel like the big iron daddy without reason.

This dark little British short by the late lamented Run Wrake is a fascinating little bit of twisted morality surrealness entirely composed of 1950s educational stickers. It bagged Wrake a bafta but is still relatively obscure as a project. The use of a chillout score and the nature of computer animation do date it somewhat and it has a distinct "you'd stumble on this at two am on channel 4" vibe. That being said, Rabbit is extremely smart with the core design quirk and months after watching it I still recall it's nasty little twists and turns. Worth hunting down and capturing for yourself, regardless of the consequences.

Pink Panther Odyssey Part XXXVII

There's no throughline here. Our guy is flying his kites, then the whole thing becomes totally sidetracked by the little man and his business. Vengeance being the principle nature of that business. I dig these panther shorts, I really do, but would it have killed them to practice a bit of circuitous storytelling? That being said, the biplane end tangent is rather inspired.

A bi-plane fact to get us up to the required character length:

The concept of "stacking wings" on an aircraft was suggested by a Sir George Cayley way back in the 1840s who correctly identified the core four forces which dictate flight. He died decades before powered flight was ever achieved.

When my partner first proposed we watch Follyfoot years ago I was convinced it was a bit of flimsy 70s second-hand nostalgia from our parent's generation. A children's TV show? About ponies??? No thanks. What I wasn't expecting at all was almost Kes-like contemporary social commentary built around some seriously complex and very well-observed character work. Follyfoot is genuinely something of a revelation. It was enormous in its day but seems now only the preserve of "it-was-better-in-them-dayers" on Facebook. Truthfully it can be rather dated and the combination of cheap 1950's film stock music and chaste preteen yearnings can get a bit much but the tough bits feel dark and this little old telly relic can occasionally be genuinely shocking. From the literary lineage of Dickens and with names like Stephen Frears and Michael Apted in the mix, it's wild that this has become so obscure. Don't be the fool that I was all those eons ago, give this a go.

The legendary Lorax short, from the distant past of '72, is a strange little artefact. My partner and I yearly absorb "The Cat in the Hat" around Christmas time so that was solidly lodged in my brain - the two compare poorly I think, the songs in this feel egregiously tacked-on and the central theme is worthy but now rather unintentionally melancholic given all that was to happen (or rather, not at all happen) in the decades between then and now. Not it's fault, but it does rather taint the vibe. Still, the fussy animation is one of the most strikingly clear conversions of original cartoon style to motion there is, and that's something.

A sort of flabbily misjudged Armando approximation that does everything Death of Stalin did but less well. Winslet is both a magnetic central presence and the reason the whole thing doesn't really work. There needed to be more of a focus on the "lower deckers" like Andrea Riseborough's Agnes or the David Bamber's fantastically greasy Victor Schiff. Instead as the plot rolls along everyone but the central duo as discarded. I'm a fan of these political satirical allegories generally but the Regime lacked tonal cohesion overall despite a genuinely fantastic cast. Also Alexandre Desplat's theme was far too silly.

After nearly ten years away from consuming the MCU (a mixture of self-denial and not knowing where to start) my partner and I plunged back in with the sequel to 2012's Avengers. It's still got Whedon's giddy setpieces, the core ensemble hold together remarkably well with the exception of the undercooked romance between Widow and Hulk. They never knew what to do with ScarJo, and that this ends up being her biggest slab of screentime until the solo film is a shame. That being said, the central narrative thread is fairly strong and there are some really great moments here (Ultron's first ghoulish appearance, Hulkbuster battle). The foreshadowing holds up well and Ultron ends up looking like a solid road map for all that was to come.

I'd literally watch Nadiya descale a teapot. I'd happily watch her just mooching about looking at wildebeest. Bake Off's charismatic winner of yore has had a few of these book tie-in glossy limited formats on the Beeb and they never quite suit her. Alone in an Observer Sunday supplement fake kitchen bedecked with whacky utensils and unctuous close-ups of glugging and mixing and so on. She cooks up a random assortment of things and her own endearing touch is to add an unexpected ingredient like... what if rice crispies were put in a roast? But on her own (here, likely for pandemic reasons) she loses a little something and you long to see her interacting with folk. The spots with guest chefs break up the format a little, but not enough really. But still - I'd watch her board a ship. I'd watch her catching butterflies and so on. She's TV gold.

Upon re-watching Julia Davis's mid-noughties dark comedy I found myself almost totally overwhelmed by how tremendously disturbing it is. It makes Jam look like marmalade. All these years later it is still thoroughly unpleasant. There's also an underlying satirical wackiness present in all Davis projects that's really irresistible, pushing the extremity at times into a kind of self-aware melodrama more like a soap or a telenovela than a sitcom. What really makes both series worth plunging into beyond the hypnotically deluded Jill is a who's-who of British comedy talent. Rebecca Front's career-best performance as the painfully passive Cathy, or Kev Eldon's hapless Terry. The cartoonish caricatures of Ruth Jones, Mark Gatiss and the brilliant Felicity Montagu. Yes it's awful in some rather irredeemable ways, but there's something genuinely glorious about it too.