The Matrix Revolutions (2003): Rain, Smiths and a Lot of Questions
My The Matrix Revolutions review: amazing action, a bleak mood, weak Smith CGI and an ending that left me with questions. Closure, but no first-film magic. 2.5 to 3.
My The Matrix Revolutions review: amazing action, a bleak mood, weak Smith CGI and an ending that left me with questions. Closure, but no first-film magic. 2.5 to 3.
My The Matrix Reloaded review: great freeway action, but the rave, the Architect and the twins left me cold. Not the continuation I wanted. 3 out of 5.
My The Matrix 1999 review: the cryptic ads, five trips back to the cinema, the dojo, the subway and the rooftop. Everything about it worked. 5 out of 5.
My Return of the Jedi review: the Ewoks put people off, but I loved it. Great fights from Han’s rescue to Endor to Vader and the Emperor. Better than Empire for me.
My The Empire Strikes Back review: the Hoth battle, Luke and the wampa, Yoda, Cloud City and Vader’s reveal. One of the darkest endings ever. 10 out of 5.
A review of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which puts both casts on screen at once, adapts the most iconic X-Men story, and quietly repairs the timeline.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 crams in three villains and one devastating ending. Garfield and Stone are great. The film around them is doing too much.
My Words of Radiance review: Shallan, Adolin and Wit step up, Kaladin’s weaknesses show, and it lands at a 4 out of 5 with one worry.
A review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where HYDRA turns out to have been inside S.H.I.E.L.D. from the beginning and Marvel makes a political thriller.
The Doctor spends nine hundred years defending a town called Christmas, runs out of regenerations, and Matt Smith gets one of the great goodbyes.
Three Doctors, a weapon with a conscience, and an anniversary special that reaches back into the show’s darkest decision and quietly undoes it.
In a rather ironic twist, I am writing a book review on a website about a book that was initially serialized on a blog! John Scalzi is the owner of…
The Doctor is dragged to his own grave on Trenzalore, Clara’s impossible existence is finally explained, and a stranger is standing at the end of his own timeline.
Neil Gaiman rebuilds the Cybermen as something genuinely frightening, gives Matt Smith a chess game against himself, and buries both under a derelict theme park.
A model village in Victorian Yorkshire is dipping people in prehistoric venom, and Diana Rigg is having the time of her life running it.
A salvage crew drags the TARDIS aboard and the show finally explores its own ship, then undoes every consequence with a magic reset button in the last minute.
A ghost hunt in 1974 turns out to be a rescue, and the monster in the pocket universe turns out to be looking for someone. The season’s best-shot episode.
A Soviet submarine thaws an Ice Warrior out of the Arctic ice in 1983, and Doctor Who produces the tightest, tensest bottle episode it has managed in years.
Clara’s first proper trip is an alien market, a girl who must sing to keep a god asleep, and a resolution built entirely out of a life that never got lived.
People are being uploaded out of their own heads through the Wi-Fi, and the Doctor finally meets the modern Clara — the third version of a woman he has twice buried.
The Doctor has retired to a cloud above Victorian London to sulk, and a barmaid who is also a governess drags him back out and then dies in front of him.