Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

Murderbot . - this series continued to be both gripping and fun, and by the end with a suitably satisfying ending that leaves room for more.  I love the way Alexander Skarsgård plays Murderbot as seriously uptight but with swirling roboty emotions he doesn't know what to do with - that can be bleakly funny a lot of the time and sometimes it's just sweet.  I love the homages to schlocky sci-fi which is both explicit and also tucked away for us to trip over on occasions.  I have really enjoyed the character development of the hippie scientist group from Preservation Alliance who manage to be both insufferably righteous, and also lovably messed up and human, particularly the gruff and suspicious Gurathin (David Dastmalchian).  I have seen Noma Dumezweni who plays the leader Dr Ayda Mensah in smaller roles, so it's good to see her stretching her wings in a lead - she also has such a calming voice I would definitely follow her into whatever risky but ethical stance she wa...

Murderbot - this is a sci-fi comedy drama with a Deadpool sensibility.  Murderbot is a security robot that has developed free will and if the company find out he will be scrapped.  He finds humans incredibly irritating but if he lets them die he will be scrapped.  Therefore he keep his clients (a well meaning but slightly incompetent bunch of scientists) alive. He’s addicted to watching schlocky sci fi series and spends most of his time watching those and using them to understand human behaviour. Silly and funny but also endearing,  this makes me laugh and the episodes are all less than 30 minutes long which is another bonus as far as I am concerned. ( series streaming on Appletv+)   Heretic - I am loving High Grant’s post romcom career.  He plays a brilliant creepy monster in this horror thriller.  Witty and smart with plenty of stuff to unpick.   It had an annoyingly open metaphysical sort of ending which I think was supposed to be meanin...

Mountainhead - I saw a preview screening, followed by Edith Bowman interviewing Jesse Armstrong the writer, producer and director, previously the creative genius behind Succession and Peep Show .  This is a very funny but bleak look at what could happen if Techbro billionaires  are allowed to do whatever they want.  Super alpha male, full of their own importance and genius, the world almost literally at their feet, we spend a weekend with them in a mountain retreat while the world burns due to a new social media launch which sends fake content rolling around the world.  These guys think they have the solutions but are only interested if it will actually benefit them personally, and because of their playground level of rivalry things escalate badly. The title is obviously a play on Fountainhead, the novel which champions the rights of individual genius against the needs of the ordinary people in the world (It’s recommended by Robbie the selfish asshole in Dirty Danc...

His Dark Materials I've been seeing really annoying spoilers for weeks about the final series of Phillip Pullman's perfect trilogy, as for some reason it was released earlier in the US, a week at a time.  So, I already knew a little bit of what to expect, and when the series dropped on iplayer on Sunday, I started watching straight away, with a plan to watch two episodes a night.  Well that lasted on Sunday and Monday but last night, at the end of episode 6 I just couldn't stop and so tore on through right to the end.  I think this production has done the books proud, in a way that The Golden Compass just didn't.  For a start the right people are British, and there was enough time to tell the story properly enough that I didn't feel there were any glaring holes, although there were some changes made.   One of the good things was the way that the large chunks of philosophy in the last book of the series, The Amber Spyglass, was spread out very effectively th...