Some friends of mine were going to the cinema the other evening to watch The Spiderwick Chronicles, and having heard generally positive reviews of the film, I went along to see it. The film is based on the series of five books written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi, which were published in […]
Updated again: My podcast commentary with my friend Peter on Partners in Crime is now online. Give it a listen! Updated: My review of Partners in Crime, the Doctor Who series premiere, is in today’s Western Mail, and also available to read on their website. They’ve edited it down a bit, so here’s the uncut […]
I just got back from watching There Will Be Blood, which picked up a couple of Oscars at the weekend. It’s a very good film, wonderfully shot and thought-provoking: it’ll take me quite some time to digest this meaty meal of a movie. I much preferred it to the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old […]
I went to see The Golden Compass on Wednesday, despite having been invited by a Christian friend to join a Facebook group inviting people to boycott the film, warning that it “promotes atheism”. It’s based on Northern Lights, first in the His Dark Materials trilogy written by Philip Pullman , which is certainly very critical […]
You wait for one alien invasion to come along, and two come along at once. Although nine months have passed for us since the pilot of The Sarah Jane Adventures back in the New Year, which saw the Doctor’s former companion defeat the Bane, adopt a son and begin to gather a rag-tag crew of […]
Amid a lot of hype, drama series Heroes has arrived on BBC2 on Wednesday evenings. Watching the X-Men films, I always thought that a multi-character superhero story was better suited for an ongoing television series than for cinema, since many characters only get a couple of significant moments on-screen. Having heard good things about the […]
Doctor Who has come a long way since it first returned to our screens in 2005. From risky reinvention to mainstream hit, the big question at the beginning of series 3 was “will they be able to keep up the quality and keep it fresh?” If anyone doubted the answer to that question was “yes”, […]
The title of last night’s Doctor Who episode was nothing to do with the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, but instead referred to the amount of time before the spaceship which the Doctor and Martha found themselves on plunged into the sun. Countdowns in Doctor Who are something of a cliché, but I […]
Torchwood hit our television screens earlier this week, with the new Doctor Who spin-off garnered BBC3’s biggest ever audience, with 2.5 million people tuning in on Sunday night. It sees the mysterious organisation ‘Torchwood’ seeking to track down alien technology to defend humanity against whatever nasties slip through the Rift in time and space that […]
I’ve just written this review of yesterday’s first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, titled Rose. I wrote it for the Outpost Gallifrey fan site in mind, so it might make some references that are a little unclear if you’re not familiar with the show, but I tried to make it as clear […]