Memories and precognitions dovetail with present sensory experience in Nicholas Roeg’s melancholy 1974 supernatural thriller, Don’t Look Now. Roeg’s experiments with film technique are eerily effective at capturing a sense of nature behaving in ways human thought can’t comprehend even as it is intimately involved with…

Which is the cure and which is the virus? It’s not always easy to tell but, on Farscape, there is a right answer and recognising it can mean not only the difference between life and death but the difference between succeeding and doing something really, really stupid.

It turns out Communism doesn’t work in practice even when your whole planet is red. The 2011 Doctor Who audio play Thin Ice draws a parallel between the 1960s Soviet Union and a generation of Ice Warriors—the hissing, green helmeted Martian natives—who have a sobering encounter with one of the founding, legendary…

Successive relationships with three men waylay Alice on her journey from New Mexico to Monterey, California. It’s not always clear whether or not that’s a good thing in 1974's Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a Martin Scorsese film about a single mother scraping by in Arizona after the death of her husband. With great…

When Crichton’s head is cut off, a variety of problems arise. The problem of succession is thrown into disarray and the Empress threatens to execute every off-worlder around, something that dampens Rygel’s confidence considerably.

A man wearing a big rubber mask holds a hammer over Ellie Masters where she lies in bed, staring confusedly back at him before finally screaming. The cruel matron of the orphanage where Ellie is staying explains this is only a dream in 1971's Blood and Lace, a captivating and schlocky riff on Psycho with a…

A big Frenchman, presumed dead, rises from a coffin, somehow not much startling the young draper’s apprentice left to watch the corpse. The imperturbable lad joins the big man on the road with vague indications of reluctance in Ken Loach’s 1979 film Black Jack. Apparently employing non-professional actors and…

Assassination attempts, marriage, intrigue, the value of material possessions, the nigh-vacuum of space, and living spacecraft euthanasia are just some of the things that factor into one very busy episode of Farscape.

Sometimes the most hazardous path is the most profitable. But sometimes that profit comes in the form of counterfeit bills as in 1962's Danger Pays (危いことなら銭になる), a gangster comedy from Studio Nikkatsu. From a film starring Joe Shishido, I was hoping for a more straightforward gangster film but I grew to really like…

Yesterday was Kate O’Mara’s birthday, to-day is Ron Grainer’s birthday, and to-morrow will be John Nathan-Turner’s birthday. So it seemed like a good time to watch Mark of the Rani, the 1985 Doctor Who serial produced by John Nathan-Turner, starring Kate O’Mara as The Rani, and with theme music composed, like every…

The country is being torn apart by ideological factions, each believing they truly represent the values of the country, and without quite knowing how they find it increasingly difficult to talk to one another. The 1983 BBC series By the Sword Divided centres on the fictional Lacey family in mid-17th century England as…

A pious philanthropist is looking for a legendary lost city in the middle of the Sahara and only a guy named Joe January can get him there, if it exists. 1957's Legend of the Lost is an adventure film beautifully shot by Jack Cardiff with a great lead cast and intriguing dialogue by Ben Hecht and Robert Presnell. A…

When a relationship runs into trouble on Farscape there’s always a danger Scorpius or a Princess is waiting in the wings, ready to turn trouble into opportunity. Crichton and Aeryn’s temporary spat turns into a problem about royal succession in the first part of a three part episode.

James Bond could’ve taken life a whole lot easier and Dean Martin shows how in 1969's The Wrecking Crew. The last in a series of four films in which Martin played Matt Helm, a sort of international government assassin, it’s an adventure film in the James Bond mould with a little more comedy thrown in. Director Phil…

It’s been over a week now since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was released in the US. In that time, the movie’s done well for something that’s not another prefab Disney blockbuster and its detractors have had a remarkably difficult time articulating any kind of moral argument against it. The best anyone was able to…

How do you assign relative value to sentient lives? When one person has to die so the others can live, are there any possible objective criteria for choosing? On Farscape, one criterion presents itself as obvious to most of the crew but maybe this is more due to bias than it might seem at first.

One might guess from the title of “Grand Theft Cosmos”, a 2008 Eighth Doctor Doctor Who audio play, that the story involves stealing a universe. And so it does. The Doctor and Lucie, holidaying on a 19th century steamship, run across an art dealer who’s gotten his hands on a painting that threatens to rupture time and…

What might a pair of earrings mean to a woman? The question remains intriguing and unsettled throughout 1953's The Earrings of Madame de . . . but, as the title suggests, we don’t even learn her surname or her husband’s. Louise lives in the comfortable, decadent world of late 19th century Parisian aristocracy created…

It’s one of those perennial hazards of a sci-fi world—getting your brain switched with someone else’s. On Farscape, it’s just one more weird problem on a whole pile of weird problems.

Somewhere in Africa, is there still a community of early hominids, ancestors of homo sapiens? And can they fall in love? Yes, according to 1979's Mistress of the Apes, they can. The story of an amazing anthropological discovery by a few Americans, it’s such a terrifically bad movie. It’s really fabulous.