Author Archives: tldrmoviereviews

TV Review – Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

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TL;DR – We barrel into the 11th season with an opening episode that will hit you in the feels, make you go ew, and have you sitting in wonder, so basically everything that makes Doctor Who work.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth. Image Credit: BBC

 

Review –

Doctor Who is a show that is one that I have an interesting relationship with. There are times that it rockets to the top of my must-see list, and times where I feel like I am watching more out of obligation than anything else. However, unlike any other franchise, other than maybe James Bond, Doctor Who is always reinventing itself both metaphorical and literally, and today we see the next step in that evolution with The Woman Who Fell to Earth. With that in mind today we are going to have a look at the debut episode of the shows 11th season (well 37th if you want to get technical) and answer the question: can they reinvent The Doctor again.

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TV Review – The Good Place: The Brainy Bunch

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TL;DR – Season Three blasts forward at the speed of light blowing through what might have been a full season in a single episode

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

 

The Good Place: The Brainy Bunch. Image Credit: NBC/Netflix

 

Review –

One of the things that you have to get used to when you watch The Good Place, is how quickly everything moves. Sometimes the show completely changed up its entire structure in a single click of the fingers. It also means that it does not waste any time whatsoever, and sets up premises that a usual sitcom would play out over a bunch of episodes or a whole season, and then resolve it in 20 minutes.

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Movie Review – Venom

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TL;DR – There are moments when Venom comes together and is a really entertaining film. However, those moments are spread in-between a dull story with some bland action, and an anti-climactic ending.

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene, and a post-credit trailer thingy (that you should totally stick around for)

Venom. Image Credit: Sony.

Review –

I don’t think I have seen a film that gave such a bad first impression in quite a while. As a rule, I try to avoid trailers where possible, because of both the spoilers and also because they could taint my view of the film before I have even walked into the cinema. But even with that policy, it was hard to escape the “like a turd in the wind” quote, one of the worse lines of dialogue uttered in a blockbuster film in recent memory. Add to this the filmmakers are trying to build a universe around just Venom, after failing to do the same thing with Spider-Man. All of this was a recipe for disaster. However, walking out of the cinema I have to admit I might have been a bit too harsh on Venom … well, only just a little bit.

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Explore It – Brisbane’s Cultural District and Southbank

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TL;DR – Today I explore the museums along the Brisbane river as I walk from GOMA down to Southbank

Brisbane in Spring. Image Credit: Brian MacNamara

 

Article –

I had a day off this week and given it was perfect weather, warm but before the heat of summer hits us, I thought I would take some time winding down Brisbane’s Cultural District among its brutalist buildings, and lush Bougainvillea. All of this is right next to the Brisbane River so it is hard to get lost with that guideline always being there for you. So with today’s Explore-It, we will take you through all the museums, some old, some new, all full of interesting things, and best of all, every place I visited you can enter for free.

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Video Game Review – Stellaris

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TL;DR – Stepping into the storied world of 4x, Stellaris takes us into space and taps into that love of exploration among the stars … or just conquering everything you see, with deep systems that give you the kind of customisation that you need in a empire building game.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

 

Stellaris. Image Credit: Paradox Interactive

 

 

Review –

Strategy games are my jam, I love building up an empire, mining all the minerals, spawning all the Overlords, launching all the nukes. As well as this, I am a huge sci-fi fan, so when you add a strategy game, to a space setting like Sins of a Solar Empire, Birth of the Federation, or Space Empires 3, well then you are on to a winner. However, while I had picked up Stellaris back when it first came out it didn’t quite gel with me but recently I took another shot at it with the Utopia and Distant Stars DLC and found that ‘one more turn’ grove. So now that I have played a couple of games of it, including some multiplayer, I have a better idea of the game and feel confident in my review.

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TV Review – Chef’s Table Season 5

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TL;DR – Chef’s Table returns to its core by using its platform about chefs and their food to explore deeper issues in society

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

 

Chef's Table. Image Credit: Netflix

 

Review –

If you have read any of my past reviews about Chef’s Table (see here) you will know that I am in love with this series that explores the lives of impactful chefs right across the culinary world, their lives, their philosophy, and their impact. However, last season I found myself walking away from Chef’s Table feeling like something in the recipe just didn’t work. Was it the shorter run time, or the format, or was it on me because I am not really a dessert person. Well whatever the case, I approached this season with a bit more trepidation than I have in the past, and I am happy to say it was just as impactful as ever.

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Map-It: Chef’s Table

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TL;DR – With Volume 5 just released and Volume 6 just around the corner we take a moment to map out all of Chef’s Table

 

Chef's Table. Image Credit: Netflix

 

Map-It –

 

If you have been reading my reviews for a long time then you will undoubtedly know that I have a deep love for David Gelb’s striking food documentary series Chef’s Table on Netflix. It is a world full of beautiful food, fascinating stories, and a deep exploration into a world that I don’t really get to visit. Well today the fifth volume (six if you add in France which we do) has dropped and I wanted to take a moment to combine my love of both food and cartography and thus chart out every restaurant visited throughout the series so far (and even into the next volume since the names of the chefs have already been announced). With the maps, if a chef had more than one location featured, we picked the central place explored in the episode.

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TV Review – The Good Place: Everything is Bonzer!

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TL;DR – It’s back and it is just as clever and fun as always.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

 

The Good Place: Everything is Bonzer! Image Credit: Netflix

 

Review –

The Good Place, what a little gem of a show this is, a real cracker. When I first watched it I had no idea what I was getting in too, and like everyone else, I was blown away by the direction the show took at the end of Season One. To the point that even now when we are still talking about Season Three I want to be coy about what that changeup was in case someone has not seen it yet. For the last two seasons, I watched it all in a binge watch session, so I am interested to see how it plays out week by week for this season. Well with that in mind, let’s come Down Under say hello and look at Australian universities with flags in every room.

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Movie Review – Searching

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TL;DR – A film that is both revolutionary filmmaking, but also deeply centred on the question of what would you do if you lost everything

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Searching. Image Credit: Sony

Review –

Films can be revolutionary for a number of reasons, maybe they have a new actor that blows the world away, maybe they are looking at a subject that no one dared venture before, or maybe they revolutionise filmmaking in some way. With Searching, we have the later because this is a film that is shot entirely from the perspective of a computer screen. We see the YouTube video, the webcam, the documents as if we were living in the screen and peering out in the world. It is both disorientating but also oddly comfortable as it has all the tactile notions of the world we live in. With that in mind, today we are going to see if this is a film that is just a gimmick, or if it is using this new technique to tell a story.

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Countdown – My Personal Top 10 Films of All Time List

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TL;DR – Today we countdown my Top 10 films of all time; from towns where there are a lot of ‘accidents’, to all forms of Sci-Fi, to do you know the man with six fingers on his right hand, and everything in between.

Countdown –

Recently I watched the CineFix crew countdown their Top 10 films, and it had me thinking what are mine? Now it was at this point where I of course naturally spiralled as how can you reduce thousands of films that you have seen into only a Top 10. Just before I threw my hands up in resignation and chucked in the towel I happened to catch an episode of Movies with Mikey on how he determined the best sequel. With this in mind I wondered if there was a set of criteria that I could use to categorise the films into a list that I would be happy with, and after some work, I came up with the following criteria that work for me.

  • Films that are beautifully constructed
  • Films that mean something to me
  • Films that are always re-watchable
  • Films that have added to my love of the craft of cinema

With this criterion in mind I went through all the likely candidates and with a bit of a struggle I think I have been able to come to a final list, well at least until I change my mind next week, which is always a chance.

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