ScreenScribe

Watchmen | SoHo, 2.00/9.30 Mondays, Neon (weekly) ☆☆☆☆ “HBO’s drop-dead fantastic new series Watchmen is many things at once — a righteously topical, thrillingly conceived riff on race and criminal justice set in an allegorical USA of vigilante cops, shady superheroes and subversive domestic terrorists. It’s fabulous and flammable and feels exactly right …  The show […]

Emergence | TVNZ OnDemand ☆☆☆☆ “A new network show that puts forward a big supernatural-adjacent mystery expanding outward into potential conspiracy or mysticism. It’s the sort of show that they don’t much make anymore … With real tension, uncommon curiosity, and a knockout, chilling final shot, it’s a network pilot whose strength on its own merits […]

Manifest | TVNZ 1, 8.30 Monday/TVNZ 2, 9.30 Wednesday ☆☆☆☆ “The epitome of what Hollywood calls high-concept story-telling. A plane takes off from an airport in the Caribbean one afternoon and, despite a little rough weather, arrives seemingly intact in New York … five and a half years later. If that sounds weird but not particularly […]

“In an age of revivals, reboots and general second chances, what Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta set out to do with the second season of The Leftovers demands a vocabulary all its own. Changing the setting, throwing in a brand new set of core characters and expanding on its spotlight structuring of last year, Season […]

“The short description of the miniseries is that Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon) is on his way from Seattle to Idaho when he’s in a car accident and wakes up in Wayward Pines, a plastic nightmare of a fake town from which he can’t escape. But that’s not even close to what it’s about. You […]

In a depressing reflection of the NZ HD market, four Blu-ray releases recognised for their excellence this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have yet to go on sale here. Lost: The Complete Collection was judged TV Title of the Year and A Christmas Carol, 3D Title of the Year. In NZ, […]

How to get the best out of your Blu-ray player? Pop in a copy of How to Train Your Dragon, which goes on sale on Wednesday. The DreamWorks ‘toon about a puny Viking teenager who doesn’t fit in until he confronts one of the village’s most feared dragons looks like being one of the year’s […]

TV2 will screen the movie-length series finale of Lost within a week of its US broadcast. The penultimate episode will air on May 26 and the last instalment, entitled The End, three days later  (it screens in the US on Sunday). Losing Lost won’t be a great loss to TV2’s schedule ratings-wise, given it’s regularly beaten […]