3DD!3

A powerful season where we at last someone gets their comeuppance. This time, regular police work is spiced up with an excellent storyline about a family and their problems with the Chinese. Bosch continues to prove to be a more than solid alternative to The Wire. Titus is king.

Blessed be the name of Amazon for buying The Expanse and bringing us another season, which probably concludes Miller’s story. The new Earth looks fantastic, but only in the later episodes…when the water recedes. The rather low-key story about the dispute between the colonists and the traffickers is completely transformed in the season finale. The sequences inside the enormous alien structures look just like how I imagine Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness. Perfection.

Another episode that grabs you and doesn’t let go. Titus has got Bosch down to a T and right at the start you can see the extreme objectivity that he uses when approaching this case involving a cop-hating lawyer. He has a bigger fish on his place and that fish wants to get to know him better. Quality.

A Danish minimalist western with the excellent Mikkelsen. In places, Levring quotes Leone verbatim, not hesitating even to give greater dimension to the characters, perhaps with a touching memory. The straightforward story with a bloody climax will please fans of this genre. The juicy acting performances (Pryce is perfect in the coffin) enhance the terrifying atmosphere of fear. It’s just a shame that Eva doesn’t have much to say and doesn’t come across as particularly sexy. Why couldn’t Jonah Hex have turned out like this?

A sea the color of crude oil and the light of the lighthouse like the Divine Light. A crushing atmosphere of bullying, lies and madness. A great screenplay with psychologically unstable characters in the main roles, who move the action along with drunken spouting and gradual confiding in each other as they come face to face with starving to death. Teh farting Dafoe delivers an acting masterclass and the masturbating Pattinson is his star pupil who isn’t afraid of taking things to extremes. The mermaid hallucinations and being buried alive are moments of the year. Aye, lad!

Boring blurb like out of a text book with no historical grounding, focused on relationships. You can hear the paper rustle during the miserable dialogs. Legs of ham for actors. The interiors are exactly what you might see on any castle tour. In term of Central European television, this is a megalomaniac project, but what’s the point if it tells us nothing new?

A great western-style offering from the Star Wars universe. Likeable characters who just don’t mess around, excellent action and quality special effects. Little Yoda and Eyegee-Eleven rule this series. A new Mandalorian is in training for the next season.

A high-octane rollercoaster ride from start to finish. Abrams is no longer afraid to choose his own path, but he has so little damn time and just one film in which to demonstrate all of his ideas. So he dishes them all out like french fries. The action scenes are great and the outcome is pretty interesting, but all of the sprinting and redundant fan-service takes away from the movie.

Netflix hits the bull's eye again, providing an ointment against pangs of longing for Game of Thrones. I know Sapkowski’s original only from hearsay and I was saving it (for later), but it’s great fun like everyone promised. Swords and magic in all shapes and sizes (if only someone could film a good Conan at last) and with the perfect cast. Cavill plays a hardass mountain of a guy, roaring and muttering (I have been given an assignment to look like him, so beware of the side effects if you watch this with your better half), enjoying himself thoroughly. I did find it a bit hard to decide when the action was taking place (while I managed season 2 of Westworld with no problem), but in the end everything fell into place. The series finale gives you an appetite for more stories like this, so lay them on us.

Clever and compact. The last season took Mr. Robot to the finish line, but not without the greatest of sacrifices. With precision camerawork, Esmail presents a psychological deconstruction of Eliot Alderson and, despite frequent pop-culture references, also manages to be unbelievably original. Masterful plot twists and tricks played on the viewer. The most powerful aspect is the dialogue about humaneness and the end of all that is good inside us. The closing two-part episode that negates everything that has been presented so far is a surprise. A story about hearing voices.