Reviews

I'm conflicted. Do I love Andor because it's excellent on its own terms? Or am I just flush with gratitude that finally somebody has managed to explore the Star Wars universe with solid writing, fully developed characters and compelling storytelling.

I can't deny the almost irrational sense of relief. After one lazy, shallow, poorly written, sub-par, video-game-cutscene snoozefest after another - I'm looking at you, Ahsoka - Andor felt like the cavalry coming over the hill.

Some folks complain that Andor is an excessively slow burn. Each to their own, and if you're looking for light sabers and galaxy-changing showdowns every 20 minutes, then it's not for you.

If, however, you're ready to see how the other half live in the Star Wars universe and enjoy some grown-up writing, suspense and characterisation, this may be your bag.

To put it another way, if you take the script doctor who allegedly saved The Bourne Identity, the adult fanboy curiosity of the Death Star-contractor skit from Clerks and a seasoning of historical awareness (i spotted parallels from Roman Britain to the Spanish Civil War), you'll get the idea.

Try it. You might like it. Just don't expect light sabers.

I'll begin with full disclosure: I couldn't finish this series. The benign whales able to swim in both atmosphere and vacuum and migrate across intergalactic space pushed the suspension of disbelief beyond its natural limits, even by the wacky standards of the Star Wars universe.

For me, this is the weakest series I've seen on Disney+ so far, and I've watched Obi-Wan and Falcon & Winter Soldier. It has all the classic Disney+ faults in one package.

Poor writing with lots of banal, unnatural and padded dialogue: check. Lazy plotting driven by inexplicable and selective stupidity: check. Endless tone-deaf rehashing of old material to no useful purpose: check. Big, expensive visuals wasted on third-rate storytelling; check.

This is CBeebies sci-fi minus any entertainment value. For a better written and more entertaining Star Wars hit, try Andor or the Fallen Order / Jedi Survivor games.

The first season was wonderful; the second season is a contrived, lumpen, unfunny mess and a waste of talent. If a demon like Crowley had sought to prove a point about greed and hubris trampling on wit and artistry, he might have devised a follow-up season like this.

Everything that worked about Season 1 - comic timing, big ideas handled with wit and style, believable characters and motivations (within context, obvs!) - is simply MIA in Season 2. It is patently a contrived and uninspired cash-in on Season 1's success. Neil Gaiman is indisputably a great writer, but there's little proof of it here.

Incidentally, there's a suspicious preponderance of glowing reviews for Season 2. Either my taste and judgement are extreme outliers, or there's an awful lot of shilling going on. I've scored the show very low to express my sincere disappointment and to try to redress a badly skewed balance.

Bourne, Bond et al raised the bar for gritty (if bonkers) espionage thrillers. This soulless, brainless, overhyped and underwritten effort stays as far below the bar as a limbo champion. It's not genuinely bad, it's worse than that; it's lazily derivative and intensely boring. Given the talent and money involved, the yawn-count is a kind of achievement.

Netflix never do things by half. One of the joys of streaming is that money and time are invested in telling big stories fully and well. The downside is that middling tales get the same voluminous treatment, which is the case with 'Inventing Anna'.

The writing, acting and casting are a cut above and the premise is interesting. Unfortunately, it's simply not a ten-hour story and becomes flabby and meandering. Given that the vaccuous vulgarity of the uber-rich is supposedly being skewered, we spend an awful lot of time wallowing in their world to no great purpose.

If you weren't paying attention, you might well mistake 'Inventing Anna' for some lickspittle consumerist tripe like 'Sex and the City' or 'Entourage', assuming you've got the patience to see it all through.

Tightened up, this could have been a diamond. As this length, it's seven-figure, boutique zirconium.

This is, alas, yet another streaming thriller with A-list stars and a Z-list script. A few locations and action sequences - Alexanderplatz, the Berlin metro, an impromptu gas explosion - feel like Easter eggs for fans of the Bourne films, particularly 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Whether you're a Bourne fan or not, 'The Contractor' isn't in the same league or the same sport. The action sequences in this flop don't flow from good writing or plotting, but are dropped in ex machina to make up for their absence. This movie isn't terrible, just mediocre. Like too many big-budget efforts from Amazon et al, so much more could have been done with the talent and the money if good, original writing had been put centre-stage.

Like 'Ad Astra', this is essentially a melancholy soap opera with big-budget, sci-fi window dressing. Unlike 'Ad Astra', there are few thrills and spills to distract you from the inanity. For this viewer, the plot holes, limp writing and gob-smacking scientific illiteracy made it a chore to watch. Given the money and talent involved, this film is far less than the sum of its parts.

This is a feeble thriller with tone-deaf writing, one-dimensional characters and a feeble stab at near-future sci-fi to tag in Black Mirror fans. It has its moments of unhinged fascination, but overall it's a frustrating waste of viewing time.

Thanks to EA for bringing the world a Star Wars game that is more than just a bitty, online-only punch-up. As a fan of old titles like 'Knight of the Old Republic', a single-player, immersive adventure like this was just the ticket for me. That said, the game is not without its problems. If EA is planning more like this, I'd like to offer some constructive criticism.

First - combat difficulty levels. I'm an old fart and my gamer reflexes are very mid-table by some standards. That said, I'm generally far above the easy-peasy modes, which is where I spend a lot of my Fallen Order time. It's just too difficult to time parries and use force powers - particularly against animals - without getting killed, a lot. I learned the game's ways eventually but I'm still mostly limited to 'Jedi Knight' level. Even on my second run-through, I can't nail a boss scene without taking it all the way down to kindergarten level. An unfortunate effect of all this is that a cagey, defensive combat style which avoids frequent death and tedious back-tracking also stops you generating and using the force powers which are really the key appeal of the game.

Second - interminable cut-scenes that go on and on and on and can't be skipped. Please give the gamer the choice about whether they want to watch the cinematic links. They don't always enrich and can simply frustrate.

Third - puzzles. As an Assassin's Creed aficionado, I quickly learned that the third-person mayhem of Fallen Order is only superficially similar to AC Odyssey, et al. Not only is the combat trickier and less intuitive, but there is far more head-scratching and problem-solving to be tackled simply to get from A to B. I learned to enjoy this aspect - apart from one or two scenes I simply couldn't crack without YouTube. I'd ask EA to make the cutesier problems a bit less obstuse. Examining one room for twenty minutes isn't my idea of a good time, nor is repeatedly failing an impossible jump because I'm new to the game and don't realise I'll be coming back to the location later with more powers.

That's it. This game comes pretty close to classic, but the frustration needs to be dialled down.

Harry Ambrose is, of course, a maverick. Great fictional detectives always are. They serve a higher calling above and beyond the daily procedural grind. However, from episode 4 of series 3 onwards, nothing made any kind of sense, maverick or not. Endlessly indulging a tormented sociopath and putting many others at risk makes no sense whether the yardstick is law, empathy or natural justice. An interesting premise was wasted by frankly lousy plotting that amounts to one tedious, irrational, self-inflicted fiasco after another. I loved series 1 & 2 but someone has lost the plot with 3.

This movie thoroughly traduces history, but so it goes. Historical fiction is first and foremost fiction, with history as selective window-dressing. This film fails because the clunky, tone-deaf screenplay makes so little sense - with or without a little prior knowledge of the history - that no amount of mud-streaked plate-armour or moody candle-light could make it less grating.

The film ignores the fact that England and France had been at war since the mid-14th century, and that Henry V came to the throne as an experienced, enthusiastic and cunning warrior-king with a keen sense of entitlement to French real estate. Yet what really grates with this script is the grossly simplified picture of Henry we're given. The writers plainly boiled everything down to a simple idea: a pouting teenage wastrel has responsibility thrust upon him, eventually steps up to the mark when his innate nobility is stoked and is so guileless that he is dragged into war by scheming grown-ups.

I fear that the expensive pretence of historical accuracy blinded viewers and producers alike to the fact that the story is so crass and simplistic, and the characters so one-dimensional, that it wouldn't make the cut for an average soap opera.

On a positive note, I can now see why Timothée Chalamet was cast as Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune. He can bring grit and majesty.

A globe-trotting, time-spanning, big-budget riff on the world of Bourne, by way of The Manchurian Candidate, this series is an exhilarating ride for fans of high-octane espionage thrillers. The whiplash plotting doubtless obscures plenty of absurdity, but I was gripped enough not to quibble. Considering the complex storyline, the whole series is remarkably coherent. I applaud the producers for giving me a series worth concentrating on. Too many big-budget series seem to be aimed at half-awake double-screeners. More like this, please.

Oddly, this movie is less exciting than watching someone burn tens of millions of dollars, because that's pretty much what's going on. It is spectacular though. Spectacularly dumb, boring and long. Soooo long and soooo boring. And stunningly, excruciatingly unfunny. Everyone concerned can and should do better.

I'm pushing 50 and I've watched an awful lot (doubtless too much) TV in my life. Another Life is by stellar margins the worst thing I've ever seen on any screen, big or small.

I would watch Star Trek V, Bullseye, Crossroads, Fox News and The Jim Davidson Show on a loop in preference to another minute of Another Life.

I nearly spat my coffee across the kitchen when I read that Netflix had given this brain-dead turkey a second series. I was still smarting from the fact that they served up this wretched abomination in the same year they dropped Santa Clarita Diet.

Colour me baffled.

I wanted to like this but the writing is maddeningly poor. The screenplay isn't quite in the same barrel-scraping league as Another Life, but it's nearly as frustrating. It's a recurring mystery in the movie/TV business - how do multi-million dollar projects get approved with scripts that are way short of amateurish?

Take the jarring anachronisms. Good historical / sword & sorcery dramas throw just enough difference and authenticity into the writing to persuade you that you're very far from home, but they keep it clear, convincing and consistent. In The Witcher, however, we have a bard badgering our hero for a 'review' with 'stars'. The tone is all over the place - one minute it's sub-Tolkien, the next it's ye olde medieval pageant, then it's just straight millennial. Macchiato mead anyone?

Then there's the structure. In the second episode, our hero is amateurishly cold-cocked and trussed so that elves and a sylvan can spoon-feed him oodles of their history, and give him a chance to right all wrongs with some sage words. No spoilers here, but this is the kind of device used routinely in many video games - a cut-scene, some contrived either-or dilemma, a multi-choice dialogue, then collect your XPs and on to the next boilerplate baloney. Forget Game of Thrones - this is closer to The Generation Game.

Then there's the humour. Like the office-bore, this series thinks it's sly, knowing, clever and funny. It isn't and it should ditch the weak gags and grow up.

I'm being harsh. The Witcher deserves harsh treatment. While a lot of money and talent were thrown at it, good writing and storytelling were considered dispensable - if they were considered at all.