Hideo Nakata’s most famous film, Ring, managed to make audiences fear those two key amenities of the modern world, the telephone and the television. Now, with Dark Water, Nakata is set to make us scared of our plumbing…

The directorial debut by Jeremy Dyson, best known as the non-performing member of surreal comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen, harks back to the much-missed ghost stories that British TV used to excel at…

Horror film festival the Lupo FrightFest 2002 has scored a number of coups over this Bank Holiday weekend, including the English Premieres of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water and Matthew Bright’s Ted Bundy…

Donnie Darko, Donnie Darko, Donnie Darko… you’ve doubtless heard the name already. This is a film with a substantial net buzz behind it, praised to high heaven on various websites. Shiny Shelf is glad to report that the buzz was well deserved…

Somewhere out there, comics’ fans dream, are all the decent comics. The ones that aren’t by writers who whinge about how awful and irrelevant superheroes are while thinking it’s radical to ask ‘what if Batman was gay?’.

One should watch this episode while constantly bearing in mind that writer/director John Shiban has joined the production team of Enterprise since the demise of The X-Files…

Sometimes, low expectations can be a godsend. And what could inspire lower expectations than a Mafia mini-series written by Lynda La Plante?

The Sum of All Fears was always going to be a difficult film to realise on screen. The original book captured the mix of cautious optimism and unknown fear that characterised the early 1990s, but things have changed greatly between then and now…

PVC clad Glaswegian supervillains massacre superheroes then escape straight off the comic’s page? If you hadn’t read the name ‘Grant Morrison’ on the cover of this issue of The Filth, you’d pretty soon guess who the writer was from the contents…

Is there a case for calling the West Wing the most extraordinary series currently on Network television?

Reyes ends up in a coma – nope, not after seeing last week’s episode – and finds herself in a strangely different version of the hospital she has been admitted to…

Dylan Moran… and Michael Caine. This, for me, is a dream team if ever there was one.

Before you consider going to see this film, think very carefully. Are you sure that you don’t have anything better to do?

Among all the mega-epics of Marvel’s current output, here’s a one-shot by two new talents that’s so low key it could easily pass you by. That would be a shame – while Spider-Man/Daredevil isn’t going to change lives, it’s a good character study.

X-Statix is, of course, Pete Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force in all but name and number. As expected, the writing is as smart as ever, the artwork is as eyeball tingling good as we’ve become used to, and the combination of satire and soap…

Remember Alan Dale, Jim Robinson from Neighbours? Well, he’s back – and he’s evil!

This is not a Terry Gilliam film. This is a film about the production of a Gilliam film that doesn’t exist. As such, it’s the perfect antidote to those 30 minute ‘making of…’ documercials shown on ITV…

When DC put out The Filth, 100%, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2 and then Dark Knight II 3 in consecutive weeks, you do have to wonder why comics fanboys think they’ve dropped the ball of late…

Writer Peter David and artist Leonard Kirk have been on this book since its creation, allowing them to produce a vast, 50-issue arc which ended with the ‘death’ of the ‘angelic’ Supergirl…

Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring is – of course – a tremendous piece of filmmaking; an astounding chunk of popcorn-with-heart. A skilfully judged and ultimately triumphant blend of fine acting, considered storytelling…

Cartoons, pop music and games, that’s what Saturday mornings are made of. Saiko-Exciting has all three…

This week a group of ex-cons find that they can’t escape a series of grisly events that repeat themselves again and again. I know how they feel…

The description of viewing a bad movie as being like ‘watching a train crash’ is such a cliche that when a truly, intolerably bad film does come along it prompts a genuine gasp of amazement at the accuracy of the analogy.

Oh, now this is more like it! Bless you, Mr Vince Gilligan, for delivering a script of goodness for us to appreciate. And – yep – it’s a Dogget dominated episode, with no supersoldiers in sight…

For a character who has left the show, Agent Fox Mulder still seems to dominate The X-Files. With interesting new characters all over the shop, it’s a shame the series feels the need to obsess over absent friends so much…

In many ways, the film could be called Kevin Williamson’s greatest hits, mixing elements from many of his previous successes. Unfortunately, the sum is much weaker than its component parts…

The worst episode of the series so far, ‘Terra Nova’ is earnest, worthy, and various other kinds of dull.

A lighter and more inventive episode than the last couple, ‘Unexpected’ sees macho man Trip impregnated after an encounter with some hitchhiking aliens…

When an away team find themselves stranded on a seemingly harmless planet during a storm, hallucinations and paranoia begin to set in…

Since the demise of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, DC’s Vertigo line has been leeching off Gaiman’s creation with a number of spin-offs and mini-series…

This project is billed as a ‘darkly comic drama’, which rather begs the question of why BBC2 elected to schedule the first episode opposite Six Feet Under, the darkly comic drama hit of the summer.

A film like Goldmember almost defies review. It’s so like its predecessors in terms of style and humour that it’s difficult to say something which isn’t entirely redundant.

Compared to the morning, it’s been a slow afternoon… but it’s always been a safe bet that something big would be planned for the end of the season.

If anybody tries to tell you that Scrubs is anything less than the most relentlessly laugh-out-loud funny show on TV at the moment, ON NO ACCOUNT believe them. KEEP AWAY from these people. They are probably DANGEROUS.

Call me a heretic – and if you did, you wouldn’t be the first – but, as Beatles films go, I actually prefer Help! to A Hard Day’s Night.

This section is rapidly turning into a morgue, what with the number of recently deceased TV series currently being dissected…

So, Jason X represents the collapse of all known culture into a pit of self referential, self-indulgent old nonsense? Maybe, but it’s also cheap, cheerful and vigorously entertaining.

Dan Dare is an interesting experiment, a British (with particular emphasis on the ‘ish’) CG cartoon that’s been knocking around in pre-production limbo for a long time, now…

With its combination of strong sexy women, rom com melodrama, good dialogue and magic realism, David Hahn’s Private Beach is consistently one of the best indie comics out there.

Not only is this a new comic, it’s almost a new genre – the post-modern pulp anthology. Within these pages are stories of the darkest jungles, shiniest pop heroes and most outlandish fantasies – all with a knowing twist…

Birds of Prey is the much-anticipated and widely leaked pilot episode for a new hourly drama series based on the strictly second division DC comic book. Fortunately it is, with a couple of caveats, really rather good.

Dreamwave Productions unleash the first comic based on the new Japanese/American co-production Transformers range, and it’s a very strange mix indeed…

Now here is a real high concept – The X-Files meets Jackass. When a kid involved filming a stunt for a cable TV comedy show gets his head caved in, Dogget and Reyes get called in…

There are some problems with the new live-action Scooby-Doo – but Eddie digs Matthew Lillard’s Method performance as Shaggy…

The Comic Book Liberation Army needs YOU.

ER is the most accomplished, most consistently outstanding, series in the history of network television. In this beautifully handled, unbearably emotional instalment its most complex and beloved character died off-screen.

Amongst Scooby-Doo fans, the biggest cliche going has always been that ‘everyone hates Scrappy’. But now Scooby fans have a new whipping horse, a movie that anyone who fondly remembers the original series is just not supposed to like…

When exquisite washed-out photography and peerless framing combine with a man talking at length about the value of family life, there can be surely no doubt at all about whose personal universe you’re in.

Now, we all know that The X-Files is getting more outlandish as it goes on, but this week’s episode features a villain reminiscent of that old adversary of the Flash, the Mirror Master…

For little Annie, Tomorrow was only a day away. For Angel fans, it means the torment of six months waiting for a resolution to a huge cliffhanger. It really is a hard knock life…