For Toy Story 5. Cinema Treasures charts the fortunes of this spot , its path to Odeon not too dissimilar to lot of high street screens. Opening in 1981 as the Classic 1-2-3 Central Cross, it was taken over "by the Cannon Group and it was re-named Cannon on 6th December 1985. It was taken over by MGM Theatres on 6th March 1992. Taken over by the newly formed ABC Cinemas chain on 19th July 1996.…
For Moana (the live action remake). Took the cable car across the Thames and walked half an hour in the scorching hot weather. When the back of my neck started to burn the only thing I had was a spare t-shirt. A red one. With X-Wings on the front. Avert your eyes. There's your treat for this blog's twenty-fifth birthday in a few days. I was just starting to grow out my beard ready for The Odyssey…
Books Probably an odd choice of reading given, hands gesticulating, everything. But between catching up with the Eighth Doctor audios, spending a hundred odd hours playing Star Wars Jedi Survivor, work and life, I've fallen behind on the books. This felt like a good way to get back in the habit, what with it being a novelisation of a story I only rewatched a couple of weeks ago thanks to the…
Film Just briefly. There are typically two indicators that I'm not really enjoying a movie: either (a) I fall asleep, or (b) my film studies brain cells kick in and start looking for flaws. Supergirl (2026) currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 57%, which, even given what's about to appear below, still seems like a particularly rough score. It's six percent below The Marvels, a score that…
TV You will have heard the news about Doctor Who going out to tender for a new production company , with RTD2 and Bad Wolf walking away after cancelling Schrödinger's Christmas Special. The BBC says they "have collectively decided not to go ahead with the previously announced Doctor Who Christmas episode," whereas Russell says via his Insta: There's no point trying to litigate whether anyone was…
Audio Charming. One of the results of listening to a concentrated number of Eighth Doctor stories in the past few weeks, with so many set during the Time War, is forgetting the sheer pleasure of hearing a version of the Time Lord and his companions when there are minimal psychological stakes and the characters are drawn along much simpler lines: a Doctor who shambles about until he doesn't, a…
Audio At the centre of the story is a killer idea. What if there were a substance the destruction of which sends a person one year into the past, and the way to fix any changes made is to find exactly the same ounce of the metal and destroy it again in the past? What if that happens over and over and over again? As Paul Booth's story proposes, it would probably end up in the breakdown of a…
Audio Bliss! Wiped from existence in the Time War boxsets, an ignominious fate brought about due to Rakhee Thakrar's work schedule prevented her from appearing in the boxset which would ultimately be called Cass, it's an absolute pleasure to hear from her again, albeit in a Short Trip set between previous stories. Unlike some Short Trips too, this feels like a vital part of her story and goes to…
Audio Happy Christmas. Again. One of the results of your blogger catching up on Eighth Doctor stories in a bunch is the number based on special occasions, particularly Christmas. The effect has been much like bingeing through the revival television series with a festive special every two to thirteen episodes (depending on increased production costs at the time and if there was a gap year). This…
Audio Baffled. In the olden days and actually still in recent days, this would have been released as boxed set so I would have listened to the first two instalments before discovering what the Doctor's involvement is, as was the case with something like Hooklight. But without an infinite budget, I decided to just buy the episode with Paul McGann on the cover and although this has a "previously…
Audio The last of the four BBC Audio Eighth Doctor stories written by Andrew Lane (so far) does not provide the showdown between the Time Lord and the journalist the finale of the last adventure promised, which probably for the best because I don't know what that would look like. Instead the Doctor is genuinely pleased to see MacFarlane as the two of them investigate the prototypical elements of…
Audio The third in the annual Andrew Lane-scripted Eighth Doctor stories for BBC Audio sees the regular viewpoint character, the indomitable reporter James MacFarlane, visiting a remote base at the South Pole to interview an explorer, the intimidatingly named Pentius Rochdale. Predictably, all hell breaks loose, with bodies starting to pile up and wild animals as the potential aggressors. So far,…
Audio If you'll excuse the blasphemy, Jesus, this is grim. Nick Briggs pops in at the start of each episode to repeat the content warning from the website, "This release contains adult material and may not be suitable for younger listeners"—which you would think wouldn't be required for something on audio where you can't actually see anything, but parts of this are absolutely horrible and would…
Audio Probably, most people listening to this story would just be happy to hear Harry and the Eighth Doctor interacting. But obviously, this human was wondering if any of it would contradict Wolfsbane. Fortunately, since this is set after Dr Sullivan travelled in the TARDIS and seemingly before the Earth arc in the novels (when this Jac Rayner story is set) when the Eighth Doctor has amnesia…
Audio It is just the sort of experimental story Short Trips were invented for, and on this occasion, one which would have difficulty working as a full-cast audio or even having the same impact on the page. On a planet caught in the middle of the Time War, a victim, Viola Wintersmith, comes into possession of an experimental gun that utilises the user's own time stream as ammunition to alter the…
Audio Time to admit something to you, faithful reader: I haven't rewatched most of television Doctor Who since about halfway through Series Eight. I've caught smatterings here and there—the odd Whittaker, a smidge of Gatwa. But most of it has sat on the shelf, sometimes unwrapped since purchase. Much of this has to do with time; the content pipe grows ever larger, and there's a century or so of…
Audio Back in the world of stand-alone Eighth Doctor adventures. Like the previous couple of boxsets from this era released back in 2022, there isn't an underlying arc playing through these releases other than the ongoing expectation that at some point, Liv is going to leave the TARDIS to go be with Tania in post-pandemic London (it's wild that COVID-19 has become part of the events of the…
Audio The audio equivalent of one of those missing adventures or past Doctor novels that head off into directions the TV series couldn't possibly have gone, Tim Foley's Hooklight has the Fifth Doctor and his companions wrapped up in a 12-part story which gives each of them a character progression which will almost certainly be forgotten by the end of the story. So, we have Adric overcoming his…
Audio Yes, I've actually heard a brand new release. The cover is a bit of a tease, suggesting that this version of Cassie in the Uncharted universe is also some kind of version of the Doctor, what with the velvet jacket, waistcoat, and cravat. Even the sword isn't a dead giveaway, what with the fighting hand in some incarnations. But this Cass or Cassie is a very different creature to both the…
Audio The title above the blog post in these Eighth Doctor Time War releases is really starting to vex me. Pretty much every other release has a single title, with or without a number—for example, Connections or Ravenous 2 . That was even the case with the first four in this series: Time War 1 , Time War 2 , Time War 3 , and Time War 4 . The next set along was Cass , but on Big Finish's website,…
For The Devil Wears Prada 2 . Originally opened by ABC Cinema is 1998 , it was bought by Odeon in 2000 and rebranded. But most of the decor doesn't seem to have been updated, including the small red dot matrix displays pointing to each of the screens with the titles of the films on them (which in modern Odeons has been replaced by a boring old PC monitor). Saw the film in Screen One, the largest…
Audio The stories in this fourth anthology of this series are all tonally pretty dark, with each incarnation of the Doctor on several backfeet, all of them illustrating Clive Finch's warning to Rose that the Time Lord's constant companion is death. In the first story by Jonathan Morris, the Fourth Doctor comes face to someone else's face with the Harmony Shoal from The Return of Doctor Mysterio as…
For Akira (1988) . Classic out of town multiplex, though it has few facilities in direct vicinity other than the Burger King opposite. Originally opened in March 1990 as part of the UCI chain but it was taken over by Odeon in October 2004. As the photo on Cinema Treasures shows , it apparently hasn't changed much since then other than some landscaping, particularly the removal of two boulders from…
Audio Happy Christmas! Originally releases as a subscriber special in December 2015, this is another out of season listen for me in which the Doctor has a festive faceoff against a race of Welsh bats and attempts to talk them into not destroying humans by demolishing their fertility rates. Just the sort of weird Who I'm a huge fan of then. Although much of the duration consists of the Time Lord…
Audio It's fair to say during the first couple of instalments of Planet Doom, I was concerned that the cover with its Axon Eighth Doctor was going to be an over-promise. However enjoyable this redo of Aliens (1986) with the Bruce Master filling in the Ripley role as he's involuntarily tasked with investigating a Time Lord prison containing the parasitic multi-form entity. As with similar stories,…