Gun-obsessed psychos the world over will be venturing out of their parents’ basements in their droves this week as the final part of the Matrix trilogy is unleashed on the world…

Films in the series: 4.

Discs in this box set: 9.

Weeks late this review is: 2.

Something of an odd decision to screen this one-off drama so soon after BBC1’s ‘Charles II: The Power and the Passion’, which covered a lot of the same historical period…

The quality of work put into this new series of ‘Poirot’ is undeniable. Technically it is faultless but there’s one main problem. Agatha Christie can’t plot her way out of a railway carriage…

Congratulations to BBC2 for running the grand final of ‘The Big Read’ at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Why was this a good thing? Simple – it means that ‘Harry Potter’ didn’t win…

There’s no real doubt that this is the live-action hit of the summer…

Clearly something of a coup for DC here, as it relaunches one of its best-loved characters with a writer/artist of Kyle Baker’s credentials…

This is a bad, bad film.

A word of warning: do not read this comic on the bus. Or on the train, or in a caf?, or indeed anywhere that someone might see you…

Though amazingly not as mind-numbingly awful as one might have thought, Richard Curtis’ latest still has incredible levels of both corn and cheese. Then again, that’s the whole point.

It’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ for grown-ups…

I have to say, I’m very sad to see the end of Cameron Stewart’s run on ‘Catwoman’…

‘Top of the Pops’? That’s square, daddio. That was your granddad’s pop music show. These days the kids are watching ‘All New Top of the Pops’…

On DVD, restrained in the box in the corner of the living room, ‘Full Throttle’ actually feels like a fairly succinct movie, rather than the last word in excess…

Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’ comes to DVD with exactly the same strengths and weaknesses it had on its cinema release…

‘Human Target’ has become one of the easiest monthly books to pick up without knowing anything about it beforehand – it is dense, involving and brilliant…

The gap between ‘Star Wars’ movies is being filled by the usual mixed bag of toys, books, games and comics. Perhaps the most ambitious, or at least the most novel, is the ‘Clone Wars’ animated series…

Being the archetypical cynical hack, it would be ridiculously easy to look upon ‘Love Actually’ as yet another churned-out piece of schmaltz from the Richard Curtis production line…

It’s a mark of the extent to which times have changed that the BBC’s showpiece Sunday costume drama contains as much bedroom action as the average episode of ‘Sex and the City’…

The impressive thing about ‘The War Within’ is that writer Simon Furman isn’t just taking advantage of the ‘Transformers’ revival to trade on past glories…

PotC:tCotBP (for brevity) storms across the cinema screen with the bombast, arrogance and total lack of self awareness that one should expect from a film based on a theme park attraction.

For decades now, new audiences have come to ‘Citizen Kane’ with one thought in mind: it can’t really be that good… can it?

Seven years have passed since the last ‘Prime Suspect’, and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison is still as obstinate, clever and compassionate as before…

Next week Andrew Lincoln returns to ‘Teachers’. When he left the big question was: Can the show survive without him? Now the question is more: Where is he going to fit in?

Avatar have found a good thing in pulling together various fragments of writing from Alan Moore’s career and recycling them in comic book form…

Criminally overlooked at the Oscars, ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’ sees the Coen brothers remain incredibly consistent in quality terms whilst retaining the capacity to surprise…

Ordinarily we wouldn’t cover a repeat screening here, but I’ve been waiting for Channel 4 to give ‘The Armando Iannucci Shows’ another airing for more than two years…

After Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee’s award winning ‘Hush’, DC have decided to maintain momentum on the main Batbook by bringing in the entire team behind the Eisner-winning Vertigo title ‘100 Bullets’…

‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ isn’t a blockbuster, it’s an adventure movie…

‘The Matrix Reloaded’ remains just as impressive on the small screen…

Ignoring the fact that ‘Shallow Grave’ is already a superb modern retelling of ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, the Beeb thought they’d have another crack.

I’ve decided to just throw myself in at the deep end with this new ongoing series…

Alternate histories are the cheap stuff of fantasy, sci-fi and comic books…

This could be the shape of things to come: the first issue of ‘Tom Strong’ to be written by someone other than Alan Moore…

Michael Chabon’s comic book debut is here…

When ‘Alias’ launched a couple of years ago, I wasn’t terribly impressed…

Come winter, come another Terry Pratchett novel to give distant family members an easy Midwinter present for that ‘awkward one’ (you know, the one that still reads comics and SF even though they’re over 15)…

Unluckily, he says, hitting cliche instantly, #13 shows, for the first time, ‘X-Statix’ dropping the ball.

There’s something unimaginably stupid and self-contradictory about the concept of zombie robots…

Prevailing critical opinion has declared that ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ is a minor Coen brothers film: I’d like to be able to disagree but, frankly, I’d only be doing so for the sake of it…

They need a big box just to fit that title on…

If this issue had featured Princess Diana, as it was intended to, it would have gone down as one of the greatest, most audacious comic books in Marvel’s history.

‘Bright Young Things’ is an assault on the current ’sleb’-crazed media via the 1930s.

Old ‘Superboy’ comics are rubbish. The ‘Superboy’ TV series is rubbish. Prequels are usually rubbish. So why is ‘Smallville’ actually good?

Whilst ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ looks set to provide the Coen brothers with their first resounding box-office success, ‘Miller’s Crossing’ has always been a cult movie and is likely to remain so…

Let’s get Hammered…

‘Kill Bill’ is a brilliant film. I hated it.

Three episodes gone and this new comedy is starting to settle in…

The co-creator of BBC2’s ‘Look Around You’, released on DVD this month, tells Shiny Shelf how he made water, calcium and maths funny…

Having lain waste to prose fiction, kidlit is moving into the comics arena. Even more so than the ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘His Dark Materials’ books, ‘Courtney Crumrin’ is more likely to be read by nostalgic adults than actual kids…