As long as Jennifer Garner’s attempts to crack Hollywood involves making movies like this, the future of ‘Alias’ is assured.

This latest issue is a storming return to form that not only ranks up there with the psychogeography one-shot ‘The Game of Cat and Mouse’ but retroactively enlivens a particularly fine story arc.

This episode is very much the calm before the storm, even though there is a whacking great storm in it…

Three crossover titles out this week – House of M #1, Superman/Batman #20, and Marvel Team-Up #9.

I should add ‘Trust Dirk’ to my ‘Trust Joss’, ‘Trust George’ and ‘Trust Grant’ mantras because he’s quite clearly the kind of guy whose work never lets you down.

Imagine a performance of a song where everything is just enough off key to make it seem like someone’s nails being dragged down a blackboard.

The first two-part story in this series of Doctor Who was called ‘World War Three’, but for the second one we go back to World War Two, for a tale of terrifying children, dashing space captains and the intolerances of wartime society.

I’m well aware that ‘The Simple Life’ is old news, being on its fourth series or whatever in the States, but the general consensus on this show seems to be that it’s vacuous fun…

It’s fast, it’s loud, it’s melodramatic, it’s gory, it’s a rollercoaster
ride, it’s packed with eye candy, kids will lap it up and if you don’t
realise those are all good things, you shouldn’t be going to the movies in
the first place.

The term ‘reality TV’ doesn’t really mean anything any more…

What Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong have done here is very simply asked themselves what ‘Yes, Minister’ would have been like had it been made today, and then made it…

Sometimes, a new work comes along of such ruthlessly poor taste that the only possible response is one of awe.

This new series of ‘Doctor Who’ is both perfect kids’ entertainment and more grown-up than ‘Doctor Who’ has ever previously been…

‘To Catch A Virgin Ghost’, showing at London’s Prince Charles Cinema as part of the UK Korean Film Festival 2005, doesn’t so much span the genres as roll over them in a tank.

This episode falls a little short visually. I imagine that the year 20,000 will be almost unrecognisable from now, so I expect 200,000 to seem as mad as tin pie…

The cancellation of ‘Enterprise’ will not be the end of ‘Star Trek’, but it is the end of the ‘modern Trek era’. In the first of a series Shiny Shelf looks at the evolution of the world’s biggest SF series.

The problem with ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ movie isn’t that it’s not faithful, it’s worse – it’s that it’s not funny.

While never likely to please the more militant fans of earlier versions, the film ‘Hitchhikers’ stays faithful to the spirit of its author, and registers as a (qualified) success…

Until now I liked the new ‘Doctor Who’: I liked it very much. But I didn’t really love it. These forty-five minutes have changed all that…

The Slitheen invasion gets serious – sort of.

So, time for the backlash? No, because backlashes are only initiated by the childish and bored. It just happens that ‘Aliens of London’ is the weakest New Who episode thus far…

Probably the biggest problem with this episode is that a large portion of the audience is liable to insist that ‘Doctor Who’ be like this every week…

So, in no particular order, here are twenty great things about ‘The End of the World’.

‘Rose’, the first episode of the BBC’s much-hyped ‘Doctor Who’ relaunch had to not only bring ‘Doctor Who’ up to date for a 2005 audience, but also re-introduce a genre British TV hasn’t seen for a while…

It’s funny – I knew that this new series of ‘Doctor Who’ was going to be aimed squarely at new viewers. Yet I didn’t fully appreciate what this meant in dramatic terms…

For most of its life ‘Doctor Who’ was an odd fusion of ordinary television and itself. That’s something that we’ve lost sight of in the years it’s been away (even the TV movie was like ‘The X-Files’ ) …

I don’t know anything about Patrick Hamilton or his novels. But then that’s the point of BBC4, isn’t it? It allows you to feel like you know something about something.

If yellow is the colour of fear in the spectrum of emotion… what are puce, aquamarine, indigo and lavender?

Meet 3/4 of the Shiny Shelf team at Charing Cross Road branch of Borders in London at 6:30pm on Thursday 14 April 2005…

Lucasfilm always put out good DVDs, the ‘Willow’ edition of last year was impressively lavish given the film’s utterly unloved status and here at shinyshelf we fully expect the three disc boxed edition of the Ewok TV movies to be announced any day now.

Okay, I’ll come clean right away and admit it – ‘Licence to Kill’ isn’t the best Bond film. It isn’t close to being one of the the best Bond films, and – and I’m being fair here – nobody thinks it’s one of the best Bond films…

To celebrate the forthcoming release of ‘Die Another Day’, we’re reviewing our favourite Bond films on DVD all this week…

If I’d have reviewed ‘Fingersmith’ after just seeing part one I’d have concentrated on a number of issues.

Well, there’s some good news and some bad news….

Those of you who have stuck with ‘Catwoman’ this far are either very brave or very stupid. I’ve stuck with it, and I’m pretty sure I’m not brave…

The Harrowing has begun. Here are our first frontline reports…

I don’t have a problem with people citing Tom Baker as their favourite Doctor: what is problematic is the way he is thought of as the ‘definitive’ Doctor Who…

‘Livewires’ is my new favourite comic book and if every issue is this good then it has my undying loyalty – unless they kill off Gothic Lolita…

Getting a lot of things wrong can add up to make a right.

This MP3CD of William Russell reading David Whitaker’s novelisation of the first Dalek serial is one of the smartest ideas for ‘Doctor Who’ merchandise anyone at the BBC has had for some considerable time…

‘Team-Up’ has just come to the end of its first arc and is working surprisingly well…

The concept behind this programme is so catchily banal that it’s easy to see how it got commissioned…

David King’s installation ‘The Commissar Vanishes’ takes as its inspiration a macabre tradition from Stalin’s terror…

Why are pirates funny? I don’t know, they just Arrrrr…

Johnny Depp’s favourite comic actor returns in what is easily the best vehicle for his talents since ‘The Fast Show’…

So, how does such a stupid idea become such a good comic book?

A little belated, this review, as the CD came out last November – but as it didn’t exactly emerge in a blaze of publicity, allow us to build a little hype…

Watching ‘Nathan Barley’ involves a sort of self-reflexive masochism that eventually drives you insane…

We take a look at the first ever animated version of ‘Doctor Who’, which is soon to be made available for streaming on the BBC website…

With a revival of ‘Doctor Who’ as a fully-fledged TV series on the cards, BBC Worldwide have conveniently released this story from the show’s last season.