While lacking a 6’ tall sword wielding heroine in boob armour riding on a flying reptile, Secret Level still gives off Heavy Metal movie vibes.

This is a character driven show that has to hook you fast. Some episodes are less than 15 minutes long. Stories with famous actors get a bit more time, but you’ll know if you’re in or out in the first three minutes.

The quality of the anthology stories in the first 8 episodes ranges from “this is a series pitch” to “this is a cut scene” to “could you give us another 90 minutes of this story, please?” When it’s good, it’s great, when it’s poor, it’s CGI filler. The fresh take on Pac-Man pleasantly surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought of the story that way, but the writer did.

The animation and motion capture is top-notch. There’s one vignette set in a storm blasted city where the only thing that takes you out of the action is the faces of the characters. It is not the case that the animation style varies. There is a dramatic change of style in episode two, but it settles into variations of realism for most of the first eight episodes.

If there is a weakness, it is the music. Nothing was memorable, but that may be a production choice. If you’re making UHD 4K animation, why risk dating it by adding stand out music that won’t survive inevitable changes of taste?

All in the first 8 episodes flew by and it would be great to see some of these stories developed as series. They won’t be, as adult animation has been having a tough time generating money. But as a project about leaving the audience wanting more, it left me wanting more. I’ll be back for the next episode on Tuesday.

Are “honourable criminals” lying to themselves? Is servitude worse than death? Less a criminal drama and more a criminal soap opera Prime Video’s Yakuza has thoughts on these questions.

Focusing on four orphans, two male and two female, on the cusp of leaving their orphanage the four protagonists here walk themselves into a nightmare of a heist gone awry. Gangsters who come looking for stolen money don’t shut up. The assassins who will kill them at their leader’s whim don’t talk. And the one who makes the room go silent when he speaks is now speaking to them. What’s it going to be, kids? Death or servitude to the Yakuza? You can have a bullet now, or you can work yourself to death at manual labour or in the sex trade.

With the characters' back stories developed through time jumps we’re shown the build up to the situation that changed their lives and what the results are a decade later. This isn’t the strongest story telling device and the show lost my attention when it went back in time. The Yakuza operation and its politics I found more interesting. Much of their code of honour is a way of controlling street scum on the ground but their ceremonies have reverence. There is no room in the sprawling criminal organisation for those who don't know when to take a blade and cut off their fingers. Self-mutilation to restore honor is a tradition.

Like all organisations rooted in tradition even gangsters are under siege from modernity. The difference is that their idea of pushing back against the pressure to change comes in the shape of a psychopath with a sword and a gun.

While our protagonist recruits see their transformed lives as more glamorous they become more isolated. Their criminal association is a stain on them that never fades. In the case of women, the world becomes something they see through luxury car windows. The show gives them lifestyles of high-end escorts while avoiding any mention of sex. In the main character’s case the world is something he perceives from inside the illegal fighting ring or through prison bars. Enforcing immoral people's will puts him in a cage.

Based on the video game franchise of the same name the characters dress pixel perfect at times. But there’s decent human drama here and the fights are competent. There’s good English audio dubbing for those who don't want subtitles and the story has a Japanese method of story telling that makes it different. I’ll watch episode 4.

Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.

The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.

The balance here as in other movies is the idea that Skynet has overwhelming technical superiority but is too inept to finish the job its nuclear strike started. But then, "AI wipes out humans and now reigns over cockroaches" isn’t that much of a story. Here we get a robot action girl, a human action girl and three ghastly children. By anime standards it doesn’t look like the state of the art. It's too computer animated and looks cheap at times.

The flaw in this show is that it attempts to ask questions the premise was never designed to answer. Terminator is a story about a stalker who cannot be reasoned with looking to kill a person who has to save themselves. It was never more complicated than that. While Skynet creator, Miles Dyson, should have engaged in four hours of philosophical meditation before building the thing that destroyed humanity, the rest of us don't need that. You can skip this series.

An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.

How are the Bandit troop? Bland. For reasons of sensitivity people with dwarfism are extras not leads. I see no reason the Bandit troop could not have consisted of people with dwarfism. It isn't that they're funnier or anything cruel, it's that on screen they are as vulnerable as the lead. The stakes are higher, everyone is in this together. Guile, intellect and bravery are the tools available to the troop to overcome challenges.

I suspect children feel comfortable with an authority figure in their fiction, more so if the subject turns grim. In the 1981 movie Sir Ralph Richardson, as the Supreme Being, was warm but had gravitas. Did the troop steal the map and run into Kevin accidentally or did the Supreme Being orchestrate the meeting? The answer is yes depending on how Supreme you think Richardson is when you see him. Taika Waititi plays the same role here but as an incompetent flake.

While in life the person ill suited to the position can get the big job this need not be the case in fiction. The forces of order and chaos in this situation are not convincing enough. We see too much of Waititi, and Jemaine Clement's Wrongness is more pantomime than evil. Someone laughed at but not feared. The big bad wolf had sharp teeth when it ate Grandma. Kids like their villains evil and the comeuppance swift at the end of a woodcutters axe. Missing that point is the final nail in this series' coffin.

This was the wrong team to handle Time Bandits.

Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet.

The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac. Even more entertaining was her long-suffering housekeeper. If they don't put both of them together again in a second season that would be an unforgivable crime. As for the rest? Forgettable. And in Harvey Dent's case, boring. It feels like we've seen Two Face's origin as often as Batman's.

Harley Quinn has drawn the most ire of the re-interpretations. She's seen as not chaotic enough or sexy enough. Or both. As a character Quinn was at peak popularity during her "Margot Robbie changes clothes on the Suicide Squad runway" phase. Women cosplayed Daddy's Little Monster for months afterwards. But that was the high point. As the character shifted to become less sexual and more zany the interest dropped off.

Harley Quinn here is interesting because she's Harleen Quinzel the way Batman is Bruce Wayne. The energetic psychiatrist is the character she plays, the sadist in the sly looking clown mask is who she is. But here the writers fail to make her a villain. She does terrible things, but only to people the writers want you to believe deserve it. I like the character, but what she does is abhorrent. Harley Quinn is an evil person. The way Hannibal Lecter is an evil person. It doesn't matter if the victims are the rich or the rude. They're still being preyed on by an evil person.

This is a fine watch for those who remember the 1990s series but it gets tedious in the last three episodes. With luck it'll get enough viewers for a second season.

With the trashed audience scores you'd be forgiven for thinking something has changed with The Boys. But the only thing that has changed is the show runner trying to distance himself from a part of his audience for his career.

Here's a Stan Edgar moment. No one wearing a red hat can damage that career. However, those in the entertainment industry unsophisticated enough to believe the show runner wrote this show for "undesirable people" can. So, in that position, you produce the work you always have, reaffirm your support for...whatever, and move on.

This season, Homelander is still trying to cauterise the parts of himself that react to others' disappointment. As he runs on adulation that's not possible. While Homelander sees his emotions as an impairment, Billy Butcher is only able to keep moving because of his cold rage. Butcher has nothing else in his life. If either man was happy there wouldn't be a show. That's always been the show.

Yes, the other characters have stories to tell, but those are just distractions. This is a story about two broken men building up to a merciless showdown. I expect the audience scores to remain in the toilet next season as well but people will watch it because the show itself has not changed. It has exemplary acting and top-notch production value.

This is one of the better fiction series currently airing. A reworking of the novel of the same name, and drawing from Anne Rice's body of work, a wonderful sense of unease flows from the screen. This isn't a show that tries to be clever, it is clever. It can also be funny, dreadful, supernatural and humane.

The dialogue crackles as an older Daniel Molloy, his body failing him, trades venomous barbs with art world magnate Louis de Pointe du Lac. Louis might be immortal but his psyche hasn't aged well. There are cracks in the foundations and this second interview is Louis' attempt at a talking cure. The hostility flows in equal measure to the hypocrisy as both men excavate Louis' past of blood and fire.

Louis needs someone to understand his thoughts. His daughter, Claudia, lacks interest in such endless conversations while his lovers Lestat and Armand choose not to or cannot see his point of view. Molloy in his youth was more modern than them. In his older years he's more worldly. To the vampire he is enjoyable and infuriating. But he is not a fixed point and has grown and changed. The vampires are all stuck. Claudia is stuck with an underdeveloped body, while the other two are stuck with pettiness and pain.

The vampire leads, male and female, are handsome. Their acting is great with Claudia's outbursts almost operatic in their portrayal of the emotions involved. The sets and cinematography make the show look bigger than its budget. Though with the limited number of locations and theatrical blocking, with the use of an actual theature, you see the budget wall at times.

I watched the 1994 movie and enjoyed it but I have not read the books. Too many novels and not enough personal motivation. Approaching this as a viewer with no interest in the purity of the source material I can say that this is an enjoyable series that deserves another season. But just one. We don't all need to be Louis's therapist for as long as he lives.

This is a kids show. The plot nor the characters have any sophistication and the story operates on a level just above a 90s television sitcom. Instead of twin sisters separated at birth and reunited as teenagers it's twin sisters separated as children and reconciled in their early twenties. Neither set of reunited siblings can wield a lightsaber so it's not that far away from the TV show Sister, Sister. It's Sister, Sister: A Star Wars Young Adult series.

While I expect a flap about the show's checklist diverse cast from those who make money from YouTube video ads breaks, the true issue is the lack of diversity in the story. The first two episodes are a simplistic crime procedural without stakes or a sense of threat. We get two assassinations in the first two episodes. They're nothing. In episode 2 of Shogun an assassin slices her way through people and paper walls to get to her target. It's on screen for seconds. It's horrifying. That couple of seconds of screen time in Shogun is more compelling than the first two episodes of the Acolyte.

For a streaming show, the production value is fine. The acting is not memorable and there's an over reliance on reusing classic Star Wars phrases absent in other Star Wars streaming shows that I find puzzling. It is like the writer convinces herself she's a fan too but needs the audience to know it if they suspect she isn't.

I understand Disney looks at Star Wars as a property, sees the median age of its fans as 40 and its viewer demographic as male. The company worries the franchise has no future as those men age. With Disney being the largest seller of entertainment merchandise for girls, expanding Star Wars as a property for girls in their early teens makes sense for the company. But it makes for poor viewing for their current audience.

I think Disney could get a larger female audience for Star Wars. But only if they moved in a True Crime direction. God knows why women of all ages enjoy guzzling down stories of brutal murders but the stats show the audience for that stuff is 85% female. No one wonders how to get more men to watch that. Where's Making a Murderer: A Star Wars Story, Disney?

The bottom line. The Acolyte is Star Wars for a female YA fiction audience. If you're not into that you're better off watching something else for your Star Wars fix. Like Andor. Again. Until season two comes out.

A luscious-looking adaptation of Clavell's 1975 novel FX's Shōgun is a worthwhile watch. You can tell there's money on the screen when the doomed ship Erasmus emerges from the fog. It looks like an oil on canvas painting. While the Samurai tropes are long exhausted, 17th century Japan at this scale may be an alien world to a Western audience. It feels substantial when you see it roll out in front of you and there is detail everywhere you turn your eyes.

Unlike the book (Read it as a teen) or the 1980 mini-series (Saw it in the 90s), English ship pilot John Blackthorne isn't the central focus. Which is the right thing since he's a foul mouthed boor here who tilts towards being unlikable. Blackthorne is the catalyst but this is Lord Toranaga's story. Toranaga remains a dynastic patriarch surrounded by political enemies and facing the horror of a civil war. But while he was an opaque figure in the book he's the lead here and you get to see his mind at work. Something the reader only had access to at the novel's conclusion.

Everyone is enjoyable to watch on-screen and Anna Sawai's Mariko stands out. Filmed before the 2023 Hollywood strike, this may be one of the last peak TV shows. Watch it.