The Knight Before Christmas (2019): Don't expect any surprises when you snuggle down to watch Netflix's wholesome, Christmas magic, time travel, rom-com.
Kindly 14th Century knight Sir Cole (Josh Whitehouse, best known from his role in
Poldark as Demelza's 'fancy man') is whisked away from snow-blanketed Norwich, England, to a snow-blanketed, proto-Utopian, Bedford Falls-like, small town in Ohio in 2019 and told he has one week - until Christmas Eve - to achieve his "quest".
Upon arrival, he bumps into science teacher Brooke (Vanessa Hudgens) and the two form a fast friendship when she agrees to let him stay in her garden guest house, thinking he is an amnesiac cosplayer whose memory loss was caused by his collision with her car.
Maybe it's meant to be an element of the crone's spell that catapulted him to our time, but Sir Cole adjusts to 21st Century remarkably - if not ridiculously - quickly.
Neither he, nor Brooke (
who soon realises the knight is actually who he says he is) can figure out what his "quest" actually is until the final moments of this 90-minute tale, despite the audience screaming it at the television screen.
While not a film to be thought about too deeply, I would question writer Cara J Russell's name for the knight as "Sir Cole" too often sounds like "circle", which is really odd and distracting.
Conversely, Cole shares a lot of interesting factoids about his life back in Medieval England, from his youth right through his training, suggesting elements of this movie are subliminally educational.
A formulaic, twee Hallmark Christmas romance, with a script that veers from quirky to cliché,
The Knight Before Christmas still manages to be endearingly sweet.
This is thanks largely to its charismatic leads, despite the total absence of any logical sense of "why" or "how" in the ultra-lightweight storytelling.
Planet Of The Apes: I haven't read Pierre Boulle's original 1963
Monkey Planet - the inspiration for the classic
Planet Of The Apes movie - since I was a child, but it was a free audiobook on Alexa this month, so I couldn't resist a return visit.
And I was immediately struck by the thought: why doesn't someone make a new film that sticks closer to Boulle's text?
With modern computer technology, the prospect of seeing cinematic simians going about their everyday lives in contemporary clothing, driving cars, flying planes, living in "human" homes etc is thrillingly tantalising.
The story is also way more grim and horrific than any of the films have come close to suggesting.
In the year 2500, journalist Ulysse Mérou accompanies a couple of scientists on an exploratory flight to Betelgeuse.
When they arrive on the planet Soror, they discover a primitive species of humans being hunted by the technologically-dominant apes.
Mérou is captured and the story unfolds over the months of his captivity, as he tries to convince his captors that he is intelligent and not just "aping" their speech and gestures.
Once accepted as a sentient being, Mérou is welcomed into the ape community as an "oddity" and given the chance to see how his fellow humans are treated as lab animals for ape scientists, leading to a shocking discovery about the origins of life on Soror.
Key moments are shared between the book and the film, but a memorable sequence from the final act of the 1968 movie (
no, not the Statue of Liberty) is just the inciting incident for a whole new stage of the novel.
If you're a fan of the movies, but haven't read the source material, I can highly recommend Pierre Boulle's darkly satirical book, to give you a fresh perspective on one of the most seminal sci-fi franchises in cinema.
The Dragon Prince, Season Three: The new season was spectacular.
I was so engrossed in the adventures of Rayla, Callum, and Ezran that I binged the full run of nine episodes in a day.
Beautifully told, effortlessly sliding between humour and horror, served up with oodles of action, exotic locations, magnificent magic, romance, intrigue, and engaging characters.
In many ways it's
Game Of Thrones for younger viewers, but with more non-human characters and critters... and more interesting dragons.
This season saw our heroes crossing over into the magical realm of Xadia, in an effort to reunite the titular Dragon Prince with its mother, in the hopes of averting an all-out war between the humans and non-humans.
For gamers looking for bits and bobs to pilfer for use in their own RPG adventures, this season is a treasure trove of recyclable goodies - from innovative magic to novel critters.
I'm pretty sure I will be revisiting the whole show with a notebook in hand to scribble down all the imaginative ideas that could be woven into my homebrew setting.