Pete Messum Reviews...

I've always believed that Doctor Who thrives on production limitations. Take Midnight , a story restricted to one set and no monsters, or Blink , an episode in which the Doctor (for scheduling reasons) barely appears, or Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways , which returns to Satellite 5 from an earlier episode purely to reuse the same sets and save money, but ends up retroactively resolving the rather open ending to The Long Game . All of these episodes are not only highly regarded by fans, but some of the best Doctor Who stories to ever grace our screens. The Coronavirus pandemic may have caused issues all over the world, but perhaps this could provide a spark of much-needed inspiration for the current production team on Doctor Who ? That's not to say that the last two series have been bad at all. We've had quite a few good episodes - predominantly the historical tales - but the show has struggled to adapt to a changing television landscape. Producing eleven standalone e

Venom was very much the victim of an awkward custody battle between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios / Disney: A Spider-Man spin-off film which couldn’t feature or reference Spider-Man, arguably a key selling point for this kind of franchise expansion. Somehow, turning classic Spidey villain Venom into a sort-of good guy played by Tom Hardy turned into an $800 million smash hit, and a sequel was almost immediately greenlit. While the first film was “like a turd in the wind” (one of the film’s memorable, terrible lines of dialogue), this second film needed to somehow recreate the success whilst also hoping to make something that might be considered “good enough” for audiences to invest in future sequels (possibly why the first film ends with an apology: “I’m sorry about Venom” says Michelle Williams ). Enter Andy Serkis , hot off the heels of drama Breathe (starring ex-Spidey Andrew Garfield ) and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (a poorly timed Jungle Book adaptation dumped onto Net

Marvel Studios’ What If…? concluded on Wednesday in a season finale which managed to epitomise the show in all its best and worst aspects. It’s nice to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe branching out into standalone, more varied stories, where everything that happens doesn’t have to fit into the “canon”. The animation work is lovely throughout, with some rich textures and lighting that put many other 2D and 3D animated features to shame. It’s also hugely impressive that the creative team managed all this – and snagged several A-list stars into a voice booth – in the midst of a global pandemic. The resulting series should be an all-time classic, but alas What If feels like a missed opportunity – nothing more than another infinity stone in Marvel’s gauntlet. At 30-35 minutes each, the episodes either feel too short to delve into their subject matter or too long to really pack a punch. The Captain Carter episode (centring on a super soldier incarnation of Hayley Atwell ’s Peggy Carter

No Time to Die marks a significant moment in the James Bond franchise – not just because the film has been delayed various times since its original November 2019 slot, but because it’s the first time that the 007 series has actually ended . Unlike the lead actors before him, Daniel Craig has received a farewell film, a definitive end to his Bond and the running storylines across all five of his entries. The resulting No Time to Die ends up feeling like an entirely unique Bond flick, devoid of most of the formulas and tropes in favour of a deeply personal story determined to reach a definitive conclusion. Cary Joji Fukunaga ’s entry is filled to the brim with a story so complex it threatens to collapse in on itself at any moment, hanging on the central romance between Craig’s Bond and Madeline Swann ( Léa Seydoux ), who at the end of Spectre went off to travel round the world in an Aston Martin. But as with all spy movies, the past catches up – albeit not with Bond, but with Madel