'Unpack Your Adjectives' is my favourite: funny, catchy, and taught me more about adjectives in under three minutes (when I first saw it) than my English teacher managed in a week.

Yes, 10 Rillington Place is creepy and magnificent, and Attenborough is brilliantly disturbing as Christie.

Yes, I like the fact that Scotland Yard obviously works with Vastra and Jenny, however reluctantly (shades of Holmes's dealings with the 'official force'). I just wish the policeman they dealt with was a bit less Athelney Jones and a bit more Stanley Hopkins.

I do love the Paternoster Gang, and Moffat works in some nice Sherlockian references:

The first Bierce story I ever read was 'Middle Toe of the Right Foot', which is exceedingly nasty, and thus a fairly good intro to Bierce's work. I somehow managed to avoid 'Owl Creek Bridge' through high school, but eventually came across it in the Dover Collected Stories of Bierce. Great collection, but not…

And while I think Liam McIntyre did a wonderful job as Spartacus after Andy Whitfield's tragic illness and death, it's still something of a shock to see parts of the scene with Spartacus and Ilithyia in "Whore" re-shot with McIntyre for series 2.

This is just a brilliant episode of television: not only for what it is of itself, as a standalone, but for what it sets in motion for the rest of the series (and on into series two). The events of "Whore" ripple outwards, affecting everything that is to follow. Watching it for the first time, you think "Holy crap,…

Roman Holiday is an absolutely perfect film, and there's no way it would be made today because the ending is such a buzzkill. Which either shows that we've come a long way ('Individual wants and needs trump everything!') or that we really need to rediscover some basics ('Duty and responsibility aren't just words in…

Seeing Shawshank Redemption again for the first time. I knew and loved the novella when the movie version was announced, and knowing that King-on-film had a somewhat spotty reputation, I was a bit worried about what the movie version would be like. I was living in England then (having married an Englishman, and moved…

Fun story: I was a Canadian living in England in 1994, and my (English) husband and I went to see Pulp Fiction at the local cinema (the Greyhound in Chester, for anyone interested). The theatre was packed, but as the film started I noticed that an usher was seated at the back, a few rows behind us. Some idiot in the…

Slings and Arrows is brilliant. Hi thee forth and watch it, churlish knave, hast thee not done so already.

"Shawshank, with its easily digested morals and rose-colored vision of prison culture".

So many films aspire to 'earn' their uplifting ending, and so few do. Shawshank is one of the exceptions. While I'm normally one to say 'Hey, let the audience figure out what happens for themselves' once the credits start to roll, damn am I glad the studio forced Darabont to film that ending. The film (and we) haven't…

Came down here to say something very similar, but there's no need now. I'll just add a personal anecdote: a few years back, when my son was 10 or 11, he came into the living-room one night as I was doing some not-very-hopeful channel-surfing. 'Put it on TCM, Mom,' he said. I asked him if there was a movie on there he…

Oh good. Does this mean Ann Dowd can be back on Masters of Sex now?

Nothing like coming on the AV Club to make me simultaneously feel like I'm among friends and that I'm incredibly old; as when a discussion of some TV show from the 1970s I remember seeing first time round prompts a load of 'Yeah, I love that show, first saw it on XXX in the late 1990s when I was 10!' comments. Sigh. .…

Watching Mork and Mindy in 1978 at the tender age of 14. I didn't know much about anything, at that age, but somehow I knew, when I watched Williams as Mork, that I was seeing something extraordinary, the like of which I'd never seen before and might never see again. As I grew older I came to understand the concept…

God, yes. Look at her in Gaslight, or Picture of Dorian Gray, when she was only 19, or The Harvey Girls and Till the Clouds Roll By a year or two later. Hot? Yowza. And I'm a hetero woman.

Even though I was just a kid when Mork and Mindy first aired, I loved Robin Williams; I didn't know much about anything, but I could tell he was someone extraordinary, with an extraordinary gift, unlike anyone or anything I'd ever seen.

Love Peter Mensah's Doctore in this episode; well, I love him in every episode, but he's particularly good here, when the penny drops and he realizes something's up. Not only is the acting excellent, the writers deserve kudos for not artificially holding things back from the characters that the audience already knows,…