ScreenScribe

The first two seasons of Billions and all three seasons of Penny Dreadful are among next month’s Sky Box Sets highlights while Hank Moody addicts can get their Californication fix in a nightly binge of all seven seasons. Screening in order of their transmission will be: Jane the Virgin S3a Fargo S3 The Borgias S2 Banshee […]

TVNZ has bought the ITV costume drama Vanity Fair at the MIPTV market. The seven-part series, which is an Amazon Studios co-production with Mammoth Screen (Victoria, Poldark), stars Bates Motel’s Olivia Cooke as the heroine of  William Makepeace Thackeray’s literary classic, which was published 170 years ago. Martin Clunes, Suranne Jones, Michael Palin and Penny […]

The Frankenstein Chronicles | Netflix, from Tuesday ➢ “The Frankenstein Chronicles does have Sean Bean, and for that we should be thankful. The legendary Yorkshireman is the star copper of this beguiling and very dark period drama, which takes as its inspiration Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic about the fictional monster … The imagery is bleak, windswept and […]

Tonight’s double-episode season three climax of Penny Dreadful (SoHo, 8.30) is also the series final. The Gothic horror shocked fans in the US on Sunday when, as Deadline Hollywood headlined its report: “Penny Dreadful Declares ‘The End’ As [SPOILER] Dies In Season 3 Finale”. Observed Yahoo TV: “While millions of eyes were glued to Game of Thrones on Sunday night, […]

Penny Dreadful returns for its third season tonight (SoHo, 8.30) on a creepy double-bill with Bates Motel, which reverts to weekly hour-long instalments from 9.30. “Everything you’ve missed about Penny Dreadful — Eva Green, taxidermy, characters who say things like, ‘This whole country is built on skeletons. One would like a cup of tea, though’ — is […]

ONE of Showtime’s best series, House of Lies, will make its HD debut next month on TV3. House of Lies will air around 11.30 Wednesdays from April 13 — just three days after its season-five US debut. The first four seasons screened in SD on Four and you can stream the first three seasons in near-HD resolution on Lightbox. […]

“Ant-Man looks great on Blu-ray. The 1.85:1 framing helps accentuate the movie’s contrasting ‘large’ and ‘small’  visuals  and the Blu-ray captures that sense of large scale scope, evident even on surfaces far smaller than standard theater screens.” “Detail is excellent, adding superior texture and clarity, and providing all of this with no signs of digital defects, […]

“The sly second season of Penny Dreadful finds its drama in characters trying to shake shameful pasts that won’t stop haunting them, and finds rich menace in cunning folk and shape-shifting spirits who make thralls and puppets out of our heroes, robbing them of authenticity and self-determination … This year’s Big Bad, the Satan-worshipping spiritualist Evelyn (Helen McCrory), […]

SoHo will resurrect horror sensation Penny Dreadful within two days of its US premiere on Showtime and 12 hours ahead of Sky Atlantic in the UK. Season two of the origins mash-up of some of literature’s most famous frighteners will screen here 8.30 Tuesdays from May 5. According to the publicity, “Vanessa Ives and Ethan Chandler […]

Fresh from their Oscar wins come Boyhood and Whiplash while taking a belated Blu-ray bow is What We Do in the Shadows. “Boyhood grows up on Blu-ray with a solid, but sometimes unspectacular 1080p, 1.78:1-framed transfer. “The film-sourced image retains a fairly consistent, though occasionally sharp, grain structure. “Detail is handsome and steady but lacks […]