Category Archives: TV

Beware the Batman: Shadows of Gotham, Season 1 Part 1

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beware the batman

Batman is probably my favorite superhero. I love that he doesn’t have superpowers. He can’t fly, he doesn’t have super strength. He can’t shoot rays out of his eyes, etc. He is very strong and well-trained, but he’s still very much a regular human. There have been lots of reiterations of him on the big screen and the small, not to mention all the different comics.

Beware the Batman was a short-lived television series that aired on the Cartoon Network. I reviewed it back in 2014 and now you can read it here.

Blood on the Docks

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blood on the docks dvd cover

I watch a lot of television crime dramas. The very nature of television series and crime dramas tends to push these things to similar formulas. One of the classic character tropes in crime dramas that feature police as their main characters is to have one be perfectly straight-laced and by the books and another to be a wild card, willing to do what it takes to solve the case even if that means bending the rules.

Blood on the Tracks is as formulaic as it gets (at least according to my review, as I really don’t remember anything about it), but apparently, it works. And that’s the thing about a good formula, you can make it work pretty easily, especially if you have good actors.

You can read my full review here.

Doctor Who: Terror of the Zygons

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doctor who terror of the zygons dvd cover

Doctor Who
Terror of the Zygons
Season 13, Story 80
Original Air Date: August 30-September 05, 1975

Classic Doctor Who first came to America in 1972 with Jon Pertwee portraying The Doctor, but it didn’t do very well and was quickly dropped. A few years later, with Tom Baker now in the lead role, the series was sold to PBS and became a cult hit. Most fans of a certain age hold a special place in their hearts for those Tom Baker stories, including me. Sort of.

I wasn’t really a fan of the series when I was growing up. If memory serves the series came on here late on Saturday nights. I remember watching it a few times (and I have a very specific memory have the bejeezus scared out of me by the Daleks which made me ask my mother to lie down with me even though I was old enough to be embarrassed by that request). But it is Baker who fills my earliest memories of the series. It was many years later, in fact, that I even knew The Doctor was played by multiple actors.

Anyways, when I was first getting into Classic Doctor Who stories I watched and reviewed this Tom Baker story, and you can read my review here.

Poirot: Series 9

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poirot series 9 blu-ray

I love a good cozy television mystery. There is something comforting about sitting down on the couch and watching a smart detective solve a murder week after week, episode after episode.

I’m not actually the biggest Agatha Christie fan, at least not in terms of actually reading her actual books. But I do enjoy many of the films and television series that have been based upon her works, and Poirot, the BBC series starring David Suchet is one of the best.

Suchet so perfectly embodies the Belgian detective I find it difficult watching anybody else play the role now I’m pretty sure Series 9 was the first time I really sat down and watched this series. It was definitely the first time I ever reviewed one (I’ve reviewed a few others since then.)

You can read that review here.

The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)

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the secret of crickley hall poster

As I’m slowly making my way through all the reviews I’ve written for Cinema Sentries I regularly find movies and television series that I have only the vaguest memories of ever watching. This is one of those things. I watched The Secret of Crickley Hall and reviewed it back in 2013, nearly 10 years ago. That in itself kind of blows my mind. I have a very fuzzy memory of receiving the DVDs for this, but I could not tell you the first thing about it.

Reading my review it seems I didn’t really like this series. It also makes me scratch my head because I begin with an admission that I don’t like ghost stories, and I love ghost stories. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote that. I also didn’t know who Suranne Jones was at the time and I’ve since come to admire her as an actress (she’s fantastic in Scott & Bailey).

Anyway, you can read my thoughts about it from ten years ago here.

Spiral: Season 2 DVD Review: A Superb, Layered French Crime Drama

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spiral season 2 dvd

Over the last few years my movie watching has gone way up and my television viewing has gone down. I find it easier to sit through a 2 hours movie than to make it through several seasons (and many hours) of a television program.

It doesn’t help that there are just so many shows out there. It seems like every other week I’m hearing about some new show that everyone is talking about and is a must-see. Who has the time to watch it all?

I have a bad habit of watching a few episodes of something, then getting distracted by a bunch of movies or another series and I forget to finish a season, never mind an entire series.

Spiral is a fantastic French crime series that I’ve watched 2 or 3 seasons of, but never finished. I’m at the point now where I’d have to start at the beginning, and like I say, who has the time?

Anyway, I wrote a review of Season 2 many years ago and you can now read it at Cinema Sentries.

Detective Montalbano: Episodes 23-26

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detective montalbano

For a brief period, I was reviewing a lot of international crime dramas from around the world, all released by a company called MHZ. The shows were usually good, the DVDs were pretty bare-boned, and the cover art was often terrible. I mean just look at this image. My daughter has better design skills, and she’s only 11. It looks like someone took a random screenshot and then added the most generic-looking text on top of it and called it a day.

The show, as you can read in this review, was pretty good.

Prime Suspect: The Complete Collection

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prime suspect the complete collection

Prime Suspect is one of my all-time favorite detective television shows. Helen Mirren stars as Jane Tennison, one of the few female Detective Chief Inspectors in London. The series follows her as she fights against institutionalized sexism, her own destructive personality, and solves some pretty gnarly crimes. It is incredibly well made and Mirren is absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend the show as you can see from the review I wrote of the complete series that came out on Blu-ray a few years back.