Movie & TV Show HD

A world where The Beatles never existed sounds ripe for all manner of Twilight Zone / Black Mirror type antics; having it be the backdrop for a standard rom-com about realising the value of what you have in front of you feels like a waste of a chance to have The Shaggs as the biggest band in the world. Still, it could be worse; it's not like Rolf Harris (who recorded with Beatles producer George Martin in 1962) took their place. Struggling singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) has finally figured out he has exactly one fan - school teacher and part-time manager, Ellie (Lily James), who is so clearly pining for him that it seems reasonable to suspect he has brain damage even before he gets hit by a bus during a mysterious world-wide blackout. He wakes up minus his two front teeth, life goes on, and only gradually does he realise that now nobody else seems to know who or what "The Beatles" are. There's a brief moment in what comes next where the film threatens to...

One of the many strong points of 80s-reboot-done-right Child Play's is just how aware it is that as actual monsters go, a killer doll is kind of crap. There's a reason why this franchise has churned out more "comedy" versions than serious ones; once you get past the visual of a creepily grinning doll holding a knife, there just isn't all that much to work with. So director Lars Klevberg goes long on the origin story; more than half the film is build up, with the evil "Buddi" doll (who, in one of the film's surprisingly many decent jokes, names himself Chuckie for no reason whatsoever) getting a lengthy origin that provides at least two reasons for him being evil that aren't the "possessed by a dead serial killer" one used in previous incarnations. The 21st century doll (voiced by Mark Hammil) is, thanks to wifi, The Cloud and various advances in robotics, designed to be able to walk, talk, control household appliances and be a child...

The best part of the first Secret Life of Pets movie was the initial one-off jokes about pets doing dumb and crazy things while their owners were out. Turn that stuff into a series of short films and you'd have a gold mine on your hands... if anyone still watched short films, of course. Unfortunately, across the course of that first film their antics gradually (and far less interestingly) resolved into a more traditional animated adventure. and this brightly coloured but blandly animated sequel takes its lead from that - which is to say, it skips the secret life stuff entirely for a trio of slight but moderately engaging tales involving all your favourite dimly remembered characters where the stakes couldn’t be lower.  One plotline involves rescuing a tiger cub from a circus, while another focuses on retrieving a toy from an apartment full of cats (this series is generally pro-dog; cats are either aloof or crazy). The main story involves cute dog Max (voiced by Patton Oswalt, repl...

It’s May 2000, and the UK police are at the door of elderly widow Joan Stanley (Judi Dench). It seems her past has finally caught up to her – but what exactly did she do? Seriously, she's a kindly old granny played (to full doddering effect) by Dame Judi Dench; how could she possibly be a world-class super-spy? Obviously that's the point. Spies are meant to be inconspicuous - not that anyone seemed to pick up on that in the UK establishment, where for decades obviously dubious types kept washing up in prime positions to pass on secrets to the Soviets largely because they went to the right school. So the question here isn't so much how she did it as why; what inspired her to betray her country? In flashbacks we see a much younger Joan (Sophie Cookson) off to Cambridge to study science, where she quickly falls under the sway of a glamourous group of socialists, especially Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and her cousin Leo (Tom Hughes). His overtly communist actions m...

With the echoes of Bohemian Rhapsody still bouncing off cinema walls, does the world really need another tale of the rise and fall (and rise) of a 70s glam rocker? Rocketman aims squarely for the same toe-tapping retro audience that made that Freddie Mercury biopic such a smash, but - suburban origins aside, and even there there's big differences - Elton John is a markedly different figure, and his music makes for a very different story. Directed by Dexter Fletcher (who handled the last few weeks on Bohemian Rhapsody when Bryan Singer was let go) from a story by John himself, this leans harder on the performance side of things, in large part because the whole point of this film is that "Elton John" is a performance. The performer formerly known as Reginald Dwight (Taron Egerton) had a grim home life thanks to a disinterested mum (Bryce Dallas Howard) and emotionally constipated dad (Steven Mackintosh), but his kindly gran (Gemma Jones) nurtured his musical talents and ...

Is this version of Aladdin necessary? It's probably a question people would take more seriously if most of the reviewers asking it hadn't recently been singing the praises - or at least, treating as a vital piece of pop culture - the 23rd Marvel movie to come out of Disney in the last decade. No movie is really necessary: to ask if a remake of a 25 year old film deserves to exist is to call into question the entire basis of the modern entertainment industry. Of course, when critics ask if a film is "necessary" what they're really saying is that a film has no obvious reason to exist beyond the usual crass commercial interests that motivate pretty much every movie that makes it to a cinema that seats more than thirty people. Again, this is Disney we're talking about here: all of their movies exist in a web of marketing and cross-promotion, and they're perfectly happy for you to know about it. So why is Aladdin any worse than any of the other polished but s...

Pokemon - smallish monsters who like to fight, which is handy as having them fight has been the basis for a thirty year run of card and video games, as well as various animated series and a movie - have been around long enough that most people reading this would have at least some vague awareness of them. Fortunately, to get the most out of Detective Pikachu you're only required to find one particular Pokeman - that'd be Pikachu - cute. It's not a hard ask. In a parallel world where humans and Pokemon have lived in harmony (well, apart from the fighting) for centuries, Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) doesn't care one bit about the adorable pocket monsters. Then he gets a call from Ryme City (a futuristic utopia where Pokemon and humans live side by side rather than the more traditional master-monster relationship) - his father Harry, a Ryme City detective, is missing presumed extremely dead. Tim's lack of a Pokemon partner makes him unusual in Ryme City, but fortunately...