Tom Hooper’s quasi-operatic mega-musical is loaded with major historical events, weighty themes, tragic deaths and symbolic rebirths, so it’s no wonder that the film version of Les Mis gets so exhausting, especially in the static, unspectacular second half. Â Â Â Â
A surge in online viewing and a rise is sales of physical Blu-Ray discs has helped drive up UK video sales in the first three months of this year. The British Video Association (BVA) said yesterday…….
“I know too much about life to have any optimism,†is a typically bleak quip from struggling stand-up Louis CK, describing new relationships.    Â
Why isn’t everyone yelling from the rooftops about this excellent Channel 4 sitcom? It starts sedately – and The Mimic’s pacing remains gentle throughout – but persist and you’ll reap rich comic rewards.    Â
Tom Cruise may seem like a curious choice to play the 6ft 5in hero of Lee Child’s vigilante novels, but, casting aside, Jack Reacher is a satisfyingly meaty whodunnit which has more in common with the private-eye thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s than it does with Mission: Impossible . Â Â Â Â
Lee Child’s popular hero, a former-soldier-turned-drifter, is famously 6’5“. So who plays him
joss Whedon’s perky series about wisecracking, renegade space cowboys, operating 500 years in the future, might have infamously been axed in 2002, but since then Firefly (above) has become the definitive cult success, spawning a terrific film, Serenity, and topping numerous lists for best sci-fi series.
Parks and Recreation’s Chris Pratt almost single-handedly redeems this predictable high-school-reunion drama, his boorish family man bagging the best lines and a wince-inducing karaoke routine. Â Â Â Â
Best not to eat anything during David Cronenberg’s queasy, exploding-heads horror from 1981. Hammy, often unsettling, performances abound (Patrick McGoohan in particular) in this wild tale of scanners, a group of psychics who can lock into a person’s nervous system and make their head pop.
Barnaby Southcombe’s funereally paced but inventively lit oddity stars Charlotte Rampling (the director’s mother) as a lonely divorcée who after hooking up with a rotter at a speed-dating event, goes back to his Barbican flat and smashes his head in.