Film Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Marvel are in a pretty strong, if unusual position these days. The release of The Avengers was the culmination of years of careful, costly work bringing some of the company's best known characters to the big screen in separate films, then bringing them all together for one epic adventure. It was an unprecedented endeavour, and one which could have fallen apart spectacularly if too many of the films failed, but it wound up delivering a film that was a critical and commercial triumph that took even the most ardent Marvel fans by surprise. The only problem now is that they have to follow The Avengers with more standalone movies, and it's a tough transition to go from something so grandiose to something relatively small, because any success will pale by comparison: even Wish You Were Here looks puny compared to Dark Side of the Moon.

Doctor Who - The Rings of Ankhaten (S7E8)

The power of love is, in addition to being a curious thing, a plot device that Doctor Who likes to fall back on in those moments when an interesting premise flames out or the writers seem to have written themselves into a corner. It's not a bad plot device, either. I mean, it would be a terrible one if Doctor Who was a terribly cerebral series intent on creating works that can stand up to forensic levels of scrutiny, but it isn't. And trying to make it so would be like, I don't know, explaining that Jedis can move things with their minds because they've got some magic blood disorder; making sure everything is airtight and logical removes a lot of the fun from a big, daft adventure series. Having said that, there's a difference between having all the people on Earth wish The Doctor back to his full power in "The Last of the Time Lords" and using a leaf to defeat a giant soul-eating star. There's matters of scale to consider.

Film Review: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Videogames are built upon repetition. Collect the rings, drop the blocks, perform a Fatality, these are the foundation upon which an entire medium and accompanying culture have grown. Each time through, the players might get a little bit better, they might keep failing at the same point, but the mechanics of the game remain essentially the same. But what if the characters carrying out that repetition had lives of their own? What must it be like to have to go through the same limited selection of motions and actions every day? And what of the bad guys, the ones who throw the punches and the barrels, who spend their days being the focal point of constant anger and frustration? To paraphrase Camus, should we imagine Donkey Kong happy?

Film Review: The Avengers (2012)

Over the past four years, Marvel Studios have slowly been putting together the pieces to form The Avengers, a film version of the comic series that brings some of the studio's most powerful heroes together. The ambition of the project cannot be overstated: over five films, the studio have constructed an approximation of their comic universe that remained faithful to its origins without ever producing films that were only aimed at the converted, even if sometimes, as in the case of The Incredible Hulk, only the converted showed up. Considering the risk involved - the very real possibility that, had any of the films faltered badly in the early going, the whole thing could have fallen apart - the build-up to The Avengers alone is something quite remarkable, maybe unprecedented.