Making a political film in 2018 is a dangerous game - no matter where you fall you’ll be hammered with criticism, so split have opinions and values around US politics become of the past few years. Jason Reitman, however, has taken on the challenge with his new film The Front Runner, which attempts to unseat the audience with a stance that lets the viewer decide what they believe.

The Front Runner is the story of Gary Hart, a politician who briefly ran for US President in 1988 before withdrawing after reports of an affair derailed his campaign. The film follows Hart, his campaign team (led by JK Simmons), journalists breaking the story (led by Alfred Molina), woman in question Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), and his family at home (Vera Farmiga; Kaitlyn Dever).

The obvious comparisons between the Hart ‘era’ and the current political climate in the US are not lost on Reitman, but he told Den of Geek during London Film Festival that it was initially the strangeness of the case that drew him to the project.

“I was immediately taken by all of the connective tissue between this story and 2018, but it just felt like a movie,” he said. “Here you had the next president of the United States in an alleyway in the middle of the night with three journalists and no one knows what to do. And then within a week he leaves politics forever? It sounded like a thriller.”

Reitman and his other co-writers Matt Bai and Jay Carson drew a lot from the tone of 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate, which made a similar move in focusing on the characters surrounding the figure of interest, rather than the figure themself.

He continued: “This is my first movie about real events and real people, so in that sense the plot was already written. It became a question of ‘how are we telling this?’. The idea was always to really focus on the people around Hart, and to think about the various audience members and how each of them was going to enter the story.

“You might be a journalist who feels it’s very tricky to be a journalist in 2018 - knowing what people want you to ask, and questions you want to ask, and those your editor wants. Or the editor who wonders whether they even get to control what they publish anymore, or whether they simply have to feed the beast that is curiosity.”

Hugh Jackman might not have been the obvious choice to play a closed-off, dodgy politician, but Reitman was confident that the actor could bring what he needed to the performance.

“If you hear Hugh Jackman’s in a movie, the clear presumption is that he’s heroic, whether he’s being Logan or PT Barnum (in The Greatest Showman),” the director said. “He’s an actor whose heart beats out of his chest, he’s a very emotional actor. You’re surprised when you watch this movie because he’s not even the main character - he’s the object that the twenty main characters are trying to understand.

“He’s an enigma, he’s a guy we desperately want to know but he’s not letting us in. He plays flawed, and gray. His decency is there but it’s also clouded by his choices. I think that was a really brave and interesting choice for him as an actor. I watch as audiences grapple with it.”

So good was the fit for Reitman, who is known for working with actors such as Charlize Theron and JK Simmons across multiple projects, that he said that the pair are looking for the next project on which they can collaborate.

He added: “There is a connective tissue between politicians and movie stars - a charisma and an ability to deliver material. I dare say if Hugh Jackman ran for congress he’d win in a landslide.”

Despite the timeliness of some of The Front Runner’s issues, Reitman was keen to differentiate the case of Donna Rice and Gary Hart from more serious stories.

“This is not a whistleblower story,” he said. “In 2018 our understanding of stories like these is that they’re about whistleblowers and truth to power, but this is the story of two very private people who ended up in a very public situation. Neither of them has ever said what happened, we don’t know, and Donna Rice was offered something close to $1 million for her story and turned it down.

“It would have been more indecent of me to say what happened when I don’t know,” he added on not coming down on one side or the other. “You can make presumptions, but frankly it almost doesn’t matter. What matters is how we reacted, and the idea that we deserved to know.”

But it’s true that the conversation around the film, no matter what, will focus on the allusions to our current era, and a time when celebrities and politicians have almost become interchangeable.

“Movies should be an opportunity to reflect our lives and reexamine how we feel about the way we’re living now,” Reitman said. “My job as a filmmaker is not to take you over the finish line, or tell you what to think. My job is to offer questions and then hand you the baton to run with in any direction you wish.

“My thrill is when one audience member has a completely different experience to the one next to them, and the debate that comes from that on the ride home.”

The Front Runner opens in UK cinemas on 25th January 2019.

Crime and science fiction fit together so well, and maybe that’s because it’s possible to use both genres without sacrificing any of the best parts; nothing needs to get left out. Science fiction is all about big ideas and vast narratives. Bringing a crime - and an interesting detective to solve it, of course - into that landscape only works in its favour, giving a personal, human angle that we can understand no matter how strange the location or the technology gets.

It’s depressing to think that crime, out of all genres, would work the best at humanising possible futures. It brings to mind a scene from a sci-fi film that contains many noir elements: The Matrix (1999). Agent Smith tells Neo that the first Matrix was designed as a utopia, but people wouldn’t accept that as a convincing version of reality. He says, “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”

I’m not sure about preferring reality that way, but there’s an argument to be made that we expect our stories to contain suffering and misery, and to make sci-fi worlds recognisable we often utilise problems that we recognise from our own social reality.

Addiction, in many forms, plays a part in these stories. Noir heroes move through worlds that are filled with those who turn to substances, legal or otherwise, to get through the long days and longer nights. The noir genre is infused with the haze of alcohol, the smoke of cigarettes, and sometimes something stronger. This series of articles will take a look at how SF noir uses addiction in different ways to make the worlds of imagination seem more human, starting with a glass of beer or a shot of whisky, or maybe something more surprising…

What would noir be without a bar or a nightclub for a detective to get drunk in, or a femme fatale to croon in? It’s no different in science fiction – every franchise has its drinking spot, from Star Wars to Star Trek. The best of the sci-fi noir bunch offer style, shadiness, a touch of seediness on occasion, and something to say about the world they’re depicting. Although I should start off by pointing out that it can be the drinking receptacle rather than the alcohol itself that sets up the audience for what’s about to follow.

I remember the first time I watched Blade Runner (1982), and the scene that stuck in my mind was Rick Deckard in his apartment, drinking quietly while enhancing an image on a screen to search for clues to the whereabouts of the replicants he seeks. He holds a chunky, square glass in his hand; I don’t think I’d seen anything like it before (Were all drinking glasses really boring in the early ‘80s, or was that only the ones in my house?). It proved we were in a different world, a future aesthetic, as completely as the vast cityscape shots.

Establishing a style to the future is such an important part of science fiction. Altered Carbon (both the 2001 novel and the 2018 television series) includes a lot of different places to drink, and each one has its own personality. That’s literally the case in the Midnight Lamp Bar, which is part of the Raven Hotel, run by an artificial intelligence. Author Richard Morgan describes the walls as, “festooned with a variety of clock faces…interwoven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters.” The characters drink their vodka and whisky surrounded by so many different faces, in so many different lights. It’s the perfect image for a story where you might change your own face at times.

Another example of bar décor that speaks a thousand words can be found in Dark City (1998). Jennifer Connelly works as a club singer; the camera alternates between showing us her sleepy, almost hypnotised, expression as she sings and a long shot of the nightclub she’s serenading. Behind the bar there are rows and rows of empty glasses, lined up symmetrically. It’s a clue that there’s something missing from this city – it’s a profoundly empty experience, for reasons we come to understand later.

Off-planet drinking is also an option, and space bars have become the place in which to mingle after long shifts in mining, for instance. There’s usually a lot of neon and lasers, some synth-pop playing, and unusual background characters dotted around the place who stare in an unfriendly manner at the protagonist and possibly get into a fight with him. What’s interesting about these scenes is that they feel like they’re lifted wholesale from another genre altogether: the western. They’re variations on the lawless town in the Wild West, and the bar is the home of the rough tough cowboy element of the space station/planet. In Outland (1981) Sean Connery’s character is obviously the equivalent of the Sherriff in this environment; in fact, his official title is Federal Marshal. There’s a great scene where he enters the bar to get a drink and everyone falls silent, watching him, until he’s slowly taken his seat and started drinking his beer. It could have come straight out of a John Wayne movie.

For a more recent version, try The Expanse (2015), based on the books by James A. Corey. It includes a noir strand that features a hat-wearing, wise-cracking detective called Joe Miller with a bleak outlook on life (there’s even a back-story for the hat this time around). Miller can often be found propping up bars in space stations, and The Expanse has a way of making the drinks and the glasses look interesting, but not bizarre. It’s a series that has its own visual appeal, right down to the smallest details, without ever feeling disconnected from reality. Perhaps that’s what including a bar scene does for an adventure set in space – it manages to find some aspect that feels like familiar and believable territory to us all.

But back in the here and now, even Marvel’s superheroes have also had their problems with addiction.

Jessica Jones is a private investigator and PTSD sufferer who relies on alcohol to help her get through the day. It’s the same old hard-drinking detective that we find in noir stories, but from a different angle that makes for some very affecting scenes. In episode eight of the first series she sits down for dinner with Kilgrave, the man who systematically used his own mind control powers on her for months. She refuses to eat but she downs glass after glass of red wine, all the time daring him to command her to stop. It’s the only act of rebellion open to her, and the look on his face as she rejects his notion of having a pleasant dinner together, deciding to get blind drunk instead, makes for a really powerful scene that reveals there are still new angles to explore in noir.

Part Two of SF Noir Addictions will explore cigarettes in science fiction detective films, television series and novels.

Massive spoilers for the book and film lie ahead...

Film adaptations of books almost always differ from the source material to some extent - they’re two different types of storytelling if nothing else. Angie Thomas’ powerful YA novel The Hate U Give follows African American teenager Starr, who lives in the hard up and predominantly black neighbourhood of Garden Heights, while struggling to keep her identity at the posh and predominantly white high school she attends. When she witnesses a police shooting Starr has to find her own voice, and deal with the costs of speaking out.

The film, directed by George Tillman Jr., is out now; it’s a powerful adaptation which stays true to the heart of the book. However, there are some significant changes and omissions there too. Here are all the ways the movie differs from the book.

Chris

The character of Starr's boyfriend is roundly the same but the argument post- the condom thing is prolonged in the book. The slightly uncomfortable ‘I don’t see colour’ speech in the film isn’t in the book either, though he does express a similar sentiment towards the end of the novel. When Starr and Seven question him about food in the book it’s green bean casserole, while in the film it’s sweet potato pie versus pumpkin pie. It’s still the merits and properties of macaroni cheese they ultimately disagree on in both the book and the film.

Mr Lewis

In the novel, Mr Lewis is the grouchy owner of the Barbershop next to the store that Starr’s dad Maverick owns. He’s not a big part in the film, though he notices Starr and Seven are in the store when it’s on fire. In the book he has a more significant role. After Khalil is killed there are various protests in Garden Heights; this includes an attack on a police car which Mr Lewis says he witnesses. Lewis speaks to a news crew live on TV and specifically identifies King as a drug dealer, and the King Lords as a violent gang. Lewis calls out Maverick, who used to be a King Lord, for sticking to stupid rules about not snitching and for teaching his kids to do the same. He shows him the prosthetic leg he has after losing a leg in the war and a scar he has after being cut by some white guys for drinking from ‘their’ fountain. It’s this argument that causes the police to wrestle Mav to the ground in front of his children and identify that Starr was the witness to Khalil’s murder (and not a row with King, as was the catalyst in the movie). Lewis is later beaten up by King’s gang. At the end Mr Lewis gives Mav his shop after that and Mav’s store are burned down; his only stipulation is that Mav puts a picture of Martin Luther King in there.

DeVante

In the film DeVante appears only very briefly - he’s the guy at the party at the start chatting up a girl called Denasia, who Starr’s friend Kenya wants to beat up. In the book though, DeVante is a key part of the plot. It turns out DeVante is a King Lord too. At the party at the start of the story Starr and Khalil leave because they hear shots - it turns out those shots were fired by rival gang the Garden Disciples and they result in the death of DeVante’s brother Dalvin. King wants DeVante to carry out a retaliation attack. DeVante steals thousands of dollars from King to pay for his mother and family to leave town (because if he gets into a revenge war with the Garden Disciples it puts his family in danger). DeVante then decides not to retaliate but his mother puts him out of the house anyway. DeVante is hiding from King in Mav’s store and Mav decides to protect him. DeVante works in Mav’s store and is taken to live with Uncle Carlos. It’s DeVante who’s beaten up by King (in the movie it’s Seven), and he’s with Seven, Starr and Chris at the protests and agrees to be a witness against King at the end.

Uncle Carlos

Cop Carlos appears in the film - played by Common (perfect casting). In the book he’s a bigger part and an influence on Starr. Carlos is very close to Starr, having spent a lot of time with her while Mav was in prison. Carlos puts up DeVante and there’s a sense that he’s helping DeVante because he feels like he let Khalil down. Various members of Starr’s family stay with him - Sekani’s bike lives at Carlos’ house because it’s not safe to ride in Garden Heights. Carlos also lives close to Starr’s boyfriend Chris, so Carlos and his wife know about the relationship while Mav does not. The conversation between Starr and Carlos about when police shoot and when they say ‘put up your hands’ isn’t quite the same in the book. In the book Carlos concludes that he wouldn’t have shot Khalil.

The police

Unsurprisingly the film is slightly more diplomatic in how the police are portrayed, and the riots are a little more PG13. In the film Starr and her friends don’t repeatedly chant ‘fuck the police’ as they do in the book, for example...

King

Perhaps it’s the casting of lovely Anthony Mackie in the role of King in the film, but this character is also more sympathetically portrayed. King in the book is vile, gross and abusive. He’s essentially a pimp to Iesha - in the film Mav slept with Iesha and got her pregnant with Seven when Mav and Lisa had broken up. In the film Mav sleeps with Iesha after a row with Lisa because King basically treats her as a prostitute. King beats Iesha, Lewis and DeVante and threatens Mav and Starr. In the movie he’s mildly redeemable at the start. Not in the book.

Hailee and Maya

Starr's Williamson friends have a bigger role in the book than the movie. Their roles are similar, though in the book Maya is explicitly Asian-American and Hailee has also made racist remarks towards her. Hailee is racist in both and at the end of the book Starr texts her essentially ending their friendship.

Khalil, drugs and his mum

Khalil is also perfectly cast in the film, embodied by the highly charismatic Algee Smith. In the film Starr and Khalil kiss on the night of his death, in the book there’s sexual tension but they don’t kiss. Starr knows that Khalil is a drug dealer in both, but in the book his reasons for selling drugs and involvement with the King Lords isn’t revealed to Starr (or us) until later in the narrative. Khalil’s mother is an addict and his grandmother has cancer. Khalil’s mother is in debt to King so Khalil’s is dealing to try to protect her. King tries to recruit Khalil into the King Lords but Khalil refuses. At the funeral in the book, King lays a gray bandana on Khalil’s corpse claiming him as part of his gang, but Starr later finds out this is just for show.

The ending

One of the biggest changes from the book is the ending. In the movie a stand-off between King, Mav and the police, after King has set fire to Maverick’s store, escalates when little Sekani takes Maverick’s gun and points it at King. Are the police really going to shoot a little child? Is King? Is Sekani really going to shoot King? It’s a tense ending, if a bit literal about the ‘little infants’ element of the ‘Thug Life’ meaning that the title is derived from (‘The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone’). Sekani does not get shot and does not shoot King and the police are able to arrest King for arson. In the book King and his gang are hanging around after the fire laughing about it. When the police and fire brigade show up Mr Lewis tells them King set the fire, but he denies it. Maverick decides to speak up too and says King did it, and the rest of the community back him up and say they saw King light the fire. King is arrested but the family knows he’s likely to get out on bail after a short time and come for revenge. Instead though, DeVante agrees to disclose where King’s stash of drugs is and work with Uncle Carlos as a police witness to get him put away for a long time. Carlos offers him protection. Mr Lewis gives Mav his store and Mav agrees to rebuild it, and bring something positive to their community.

Wonder Woman 1984 has been bumped back a whole seven months – moving from November 2019 to June 2020. 

Gal Gadot announced the news herself in an Instagram post last night, adding a confusing caption that tried really hard to turn a bad thing into a good thing. 

“Super excited to announce that, thanks to the changing landscape, we are able to put Wonder Woman back to its rightful home. June 5, 2020. Be there or be square!”

Putting Wonder Woman “back to its rightful home” seems to be referring to the fact that the first film came out during the first weekend of June in 2017, but it does seem a bit much to claim that slot as “home” after only one movie. 

More interesting is the use of the phrase “changing landscape” which points to the frantic reshuffling that seems to be going on at DC and Marvel at the moment. 

Aquaman is next out of the gate for DC in December, followed by Shazam! in April, but after that everything seems a bit up in the air. Joker is pegged for October 2019, but that’s not really a proper DCEU movie. Disney’s choice to bump Guardian’s Of The Galaxy Vol 3 (and their subsequent decision to rush Doctor Strange 2 into production), not to mention the fallout from their Fox merger, seems to have had a knock-on effect for DC – who will want to avoid any clashes with Marvel, as well as making use of any big gaps. 

Wonder Woman 1984 is already midway through production, and it’s still on track on to wrap in December, so it doesn't sound like the delay is being caused by anything other than scheduling tactics.  

“We had tremendous success releasing the first Wonder Woman film during the summer so when we saw an opportunity to take advantage of the changing competitive landscape, we did,” Warner Bros. president of distribution, Jeff Goldstein, said in a statement. “This move lands the film exactly where it belongs.” 

Not that we know anything about distribution strategy, but it does seem a bit odd. If the film came out in November 2019, as originally planned, it would have been competing with Zombieland 2, Sonic The Hedgehog and Terminator 6. In its new slot, it’s up against the likes of Godzilla vs Kong, Maleficent 2, Dwayne Johnston’s (and Gal Gadot’s) Red Notice, a new Pixar film and Top Gun: Maverick. Unless the "changing landscape" also points to something bigger going on in the DCEU?

This year’s Halloween sequel has broken several records in its opening weekend, taking over $77million at the US box office. 

Now officially the biggest opening for any horror film with a female lead, the biggest for any film with a female lead over 55, and the biggest for any Halloween movie in the franchise, the film is only just behind this year's Venom for the all-time October record. 

Jamie Lee Curtis took to Twitter to celebrate with “one boast post”, sharing a photo of herself and her female co-stars. 

“I am enormously proud of this film,” said Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions, who co-financed the film with Miramax. “Halloween brings the franchise back to life in a fresh, relevant and fun way that is winning over fans and critics alike.” 

Jim Orr, Universal's president of domestic distribution, put the success down to the big time gap between the original Halloween and the latest instalment (ignoring the other dozen sequels that the film tries to paper over). “There had been quite some time since the original film,” Orr said. “You combine that with the return of a tremendous star in Jamie Lee Curtis, great writing, great filmmaking. All of that comes together as a perfect storm.”

We agreed in our review, calling it “respectful and progressive, chilling and inventive and frankly much better than many of us dared to expect”. 

Well done Laurie. 

Disenchantment season 2 is a go over at Netflix!

Netflix is apparently enchanted enough with Disenchantment, since it has just given an order for season 2 of the series, setting up another 20 episodes… for 2020 and 2021. – Yeah, that’s going to need an explanation.

Indeed, it will be nearly two years until Disenchantment season 2 arrives, seeing as season 1 is still not technically finished. With 10 episodes of the inaugural season having premiered on Netflix back on August 17, fans are still awaiting the second half, which is set to arrive sometime in 2019. Thus, Disenchantment will continue to adhere to a release strategy of annual half-seasons, meaning that season 2 will premiere its first half in 2020, followed the second half in 2021. Consequently, the season 2 renewal means that the series will be around for at least the next three years.

As creator Matt Groening expresses in a statement:

“We’re excited to continue this epic journey with Netflix. Stay tuned for more cranked-up suspense, infuriating plot twists, and beloved characters getting knocked off.”

The story of Disenchantment centres on the exploits of the hard-drinking Princess Bean (Abbi Jacobson), who, joined by her elven companion Elfo (Nat Faxon) and personal demon Luci (Eric André), experience very real concepts like life, death, love and sex within a magical medieval world called Dreamland. The series, much like The Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s Futurama, taps heavily into well genre satire, this time utilising fantasy tropes. However, unlike Groening’s Fox shows, Disenchantment conforms itself to Netflix binge-watching, mostly telling a linear story across the season instead resetting the status quo each episode.

Jacobson, Faxon and André are joined in the Disenchantment voice cast by John DiMaggio, Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, David Herman, Tress MacNeille, Matt Berry, Rich Fulcher, Jeny Batten, Lucy Montgomery and Noel Fielding.

Ralph Breaks The Internet seems to be enjoying poking fun at Disney – with trailers making jokes about Princesses, streaming services and everything else the Mouse House owns, but there’s one character that’s completely off limits. 

“At one point, we had a joke about Kylo Ren being kind of a spoiled child,” director Rich Moore told IGN. “We went to Lucasfilm and said, 'Here’s what we’re doing.' And they said, 'Well, we’d prefer you don’t show him as a spoiled child. You know, he is our villain, and we’d prefer you don’t do that.' So we were respectful of that." 

To be fair, Kylo Ren is a bit of a big baby. He has a temper tantrum every time something doesn't go his way like this:

And this:

To be fair to Moore, it’s not even the first time someone has made fun of Ren for being a spoiled brat – with Adam Driver even doing a whole skit about it on his recent SNL appearance:

Does this mean Kylo is finally growing up and taking some responsibility in Episode IX? Is he going to stop sulking and throwing things around? We certainly hope so young man.

Gotham season 5 has been teasing a tour-de-force final season that looks to wrap the eccentric Fox Batman prequel series in a satisfyingly poetic manner. Amongst said teases is the debut of the masked muscle-bound Batman-back-breaker and reaper of reckonings himself, Bane, as played by Shane West (Salem, Nikita, ER). Now, the first image of West in full Bane mode has been released.

Here it is, the Gotham-ised version of the brutal Batman antagonist, Bane. – At least, that’s what we’re being told by writer/producer Tze Chun, who posted the image today.

Longtime viewers of Gotham understand that the series, in its – often boundaries pushing – status as a prequel set during a time when Bruce Wayne is a teen, tends to embrace a unique aesthetic that tends manifest as a bizarre stylistic amalgam. You can argue that the 1990s animated iteration, Batman: The Animated Series, effectively implemented something similar. Indeed, we see that West's Bane has received the now-signature Gotham“proto” treatment, which attempts to reverse-engineer the character as we know him to a point when he’s just starting to embrace the intravenous drug, Venom, which enhances his strength and aggression.

Bane was always destined for big things; an idea signaled by the fact that he was introduced in his own standalone, 1992’s Batman: Vengeance of Bane (dated Jan. 1993). Yet, his origin story has been significantly altered in just about every one of his multimedia iterations, notably as a mindless brute in 1997’s Batman & Robin and with Tom Hardy’s wheezing explosives enthusiast in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.

His comic origin depicts him as the son of Edmund Dorrance/King Snake, a revolutionary whose efforts to overtake the fictional Caribbean nation of Santa Prisca yielded the bizarre penalty of his young son, Eduardo, serving a life sentence in his place at a brutal prison called Peña Duro, where he became hardened physically while using the library to enrich himself intellectually. During his lowest of lows, young Bane became obsessed with a vision of a bat; an inspiration that parallels Bruce Wayne’s own transformation, which makes Bane a poetic enemy. Of course, Bane’s coming out party was the “Knightfall” storyline, in which he freed Arkham Asylum’s deadliest occupants, wearing Batman down until a fateful confrontation in which he broke Batman’s back.

Indeed, for all of Gotham’s anachronisms, the plan with Bane is to generally (emphasis on "generally,") stay within the bounds of the traditional origin story, maintaining his comic tropes. Thus, Shane West’s Bane – in Gotham-ised prequel mode – is hardly the muscle-bound back-breaker that we know and love, both as a Bat-villain and in his antihero turns, notably as a member of Secret Six. – With no Bat to obsessed over and play against, he seems more like a malevolent Count of Monte Cristo, one who happens to be dressed like a steampunk exterminator. – We’ll have to see just how far along Bane is with his addiction to Venom, which he traditionally administers through a pump that sends the stuff directly into his brain.

Gotham season 5 will kick off a shortened swan song run in early 2019.

Oliver Queen certainly hasn't failed his network. The CW has ensured Arrow would return for a full season 7, and Sky will continue to air it here in the UK.

Here's a preview of the next episode for you...

And here's the synopsis...

Still in prison, Oliver (Stephen Amell) faces his biggest challenge yet. Meanwhile, Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) gets an intriguing offer, and Diggle (David Ramsey) asks Curtis (Echo Kellum) to go undercover for ARGUS.

More as we have it.

Arrow season 7 air date

The CW started airing the seventh season on 15th October. Sky One began broadcasting it on October 23rd.

Find more Arrow season 7 news on the next page...

Arrow season 7 story

Here's the latest synopsis for season 7...

There has been no shortage of close calls for Oliver Queen when it comes to protecting his Super Hero identity, but in the season six finale, he was finally backed into a corner and forced to reveal himself to the world as the Green Arrow. Now, Oliver will come face-to-face with many of the criminals he placed behind bars, as he makes a new home for himself at Slabside Maximum Security Prison. Oliver will find himself vulnerable in a way unlike ever before when a mysterious new enemy begins to unravel his work as Green Arrow, challenging him to redeem his name or risk losing everything.

So what else do we know about Arrow's seventh season so far...?

Well, we know that this year's Arrowverse crossover event will feature Batwoman (!) in some capacity, and Gotham City, too. The Longbow Hunters are set to be introduced, and Oliver will probably get out of prison at some point. Roy will also have to deal with the fallout from Oliver revealing his identity, and Felicity and William's lives will be forever changed.

We also know that, come Arrow season 7, Stephen Amell’s Oliver Queen/Green Arrow will no longer have Paul Blackthorne’s Quentin Lance as a foil. There's more on that on page 2, if you're curious, but beware: the info contains mild spoilers.

Arrow season 7 cast

Colton Haynes will make his return on Arrow season 7, once again making character Roy Harper, a.k.a. Arsenal, a series regular.

Haynes, former star of Teen Wolf, initially joined Arrow as Roy Harper in the middle of season 1 back in 2013. The character experienced an arc going from acrobatic pickpocket to Oliver Queen’s sidekick and protégé to love interest to Oliver’s sister, Thea. However, as the series evolved, Roy’s role saw a major reduction, leading to Haynes's exiting the series in 2015, after which he fielded runs on Scream Queens and American Horror Story, though returning for for the occasional guest spot.

Now, going into season 7, Haynes’s Roy/Arsenal will arrive at an opportune time, story-wise, as the Team Arrow discord that has come to dominate season 6 – just in the last episode – saw founding member John Diggle (David Ramsey) walk out the door to do his own thing (though he’s still on the show). Thus, Roy could fill a much-needed vacancy, likely set to pick up his bow and don his Arsenal costume to help Oliver’s nocturnal crimefighting efforts.

Additionally, the move will arrive after another major seismic shift with the recent exit of Oliver’s deadly-trained kid sister, and Roy’s longtime love, Thea Queen (Willa Holland), who was written off the show indefinitely with the purpose of joining Nyssa al Ghul (Katrina Law) in fighting the good fight in a civil war amongst the League of Assassins against evil offshoot the Thanatos Guild. As Haynes expresses in a statement:

“I could not be happier to return to my role as Roy Harper alongside my Arrow family.”

Arrow‘s executive producers also chime in on Haynes’s return as a regular, stating:

“We’re very fortunate and excited to welcome back Colton to Arrow. While we’ve always enjoyed Colton’s returns to the show, we couldn’t be more thrilled to have him return as a proper series regular — and we’re very excited about all the creative opportunities Roy Harper’s return affords us.”

Indeed, this will be an especially welcome homecoming for Haynes as a regular, since, in the traditional DC comic book stories, Roy was the Green Arrow’s original teen sidekick (first as Speedy, later as Teen Titans member Red Arrow, later as Arsenal); essentially the Robin to Green Arrow’s Batman.

On a potentially crucial note, Haynes’s Roy, who has been fielding guest spots in recent episodes – notably involved in Thea Queen's sendoff storyline – seemed intent on joining Thea on her quest to fight the Thanatos Guild and protect the newfound Lazarus Pits. However, his prospective return to Star City as a regular member of Team Arrow might put a damper on such an idea. Of course, there's still time to iron out those plot details as Arrow moves toward its 17th May season finale air date in the US.

Paul Blackthorne, who has played Quentin Lance since the very beginning of the series, will not be returning for Arrow season 7. However, no details have been provided in regards to the reason Blackthorne is leaving the series, or the manner in which his character, Lance, will bow out. Indeed, the widely-used wording at this time is that Blackthorne will be finished "as a series regular," which is language that doesn’t necessarily rule out returns as a guest star. A similar open-ended exit just occurred on the series with the recent departure of original cast member Willa Holland, who played Thea Queen/Speedy.

Quentin Lance started on the series as a police detective who proved to be a thorn in the side of Oliver Queen’s early endeavours as a nocturnal vigilante, outraged by his violent methods and constantly hunting him with a tenacity that seemed counterproductive to whatever greater threat happened to be plotting the destruction of Starling City (later redubbed Star City). However, it was an awkward relationship even without the hood, since Quentin also happened to be the father of Oliver’s then-love-interest, Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) and her sister (and his former fling,) Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), whose lives would undergo a series of tragedies.

The Arrow exit could signal a big change for Blackthorne, who has only fielded a few roles outside the series – including guest appearance on the other CW/DC shows – since its launch back in 2012. Before that, he fielded numerous TV runs on shows like The River, The Gates, Leverage, Lipstick Jungle, Big Shots, The Desden Files, Deadwood, 24, E.R. and more. He also appeared in films such as Daisy Winters and Dumb And Dumber To.

Arrow season 7 renewal

Oliver Queen certainly hasn't failed his network. The CW has confirmed that Arrow season 7 is a go, and will return for the autumn 2018 TV season. Arrow kicked off the CW's incredible interconnected universe of DC superhero TV shows, and nobody, least of all this writer, would ever expect a show about Green Arrow would end up being one of the longest-running, most successful superhero TV shows in history. That's what happens when you get a great cast together and consistently deliver some of the most insane action and stuntwork on TV each week.

“As The CW expands to a six-night, Sunday through Friday schedule next season, we are proud to have such a deep bench of great returning series for 2018-19,” said CW president Mark Pedowitz in a statement. “By picking these ten series up for next season, we have a terrific selection of programming to choose from when we set our fall schedule in May, with more still to come.”

Arrow has had a rocky few years, delivering a particularly uneven season four before bouncing back with season five, and an even stronger sixth season. The show has become less reliant on flashbacks, expanded its superheroic supporting cast, and becomes more ambitious with those trademark fight sequences all the time. Even its new Thursday night timeslot couldn't slow it down.

Arrow season 7 new showrunner announced

Arrow will also see a change of leadership when it returns for season 7.

According to Deadline, current co-executive producer Beth Schwartz will be taking over showrunning duties from Wendy Mericle and Marc Guggenheim. The former will be departing the show altogether, while the latter will be sticking around as an executive consultant. Guggenheim will be filling the same role on Legends Of Tomorrow, with current co-showrunner Phil Klemmer talking over full showrunner duties on that Arrowverse show.

Schwartz first joined the Berlanti team as an assistant for Berlanti during his Everwood days. She joined Arrow in season 1 as a writers assistant before being promoted to a writer and then co-executive producer in season 6.

"We are all so incredibly thrilled to announce Beth Schwartz as the new showrunner of Arrow," Berlanti said in a statement. "She has been a source of some of the show’s most exciting and memorable moments from the beginning. Beth is a true leader and a captivating storyteller, and we all can’t wait for the audience to see what she and her team dream up as they take Arrow into its next big chapter."

It will be interesting to see if and how Arrow changes under new leadership. As Schwartz is already part of the team, it's doubtful we'll see any major narrative switch-ups in her first year as showrunner. It will also be interesting to see where Mericle goes next. Mericle has worked on Arrow since the pilot and has served as a co-showrunner since season 4. We wish her the best of luck wherever she ends up next.

Daredevil is back in his third season, and as usual we’re going to be reviewing every episode of the series – one per day – providing analysis, Easter egg spots and speculation for those who aren’t planning to binge it all in one go. All discussion is welcome but please don’t spoil future episodes in the comments.

This review contains spoilers.

3.5 The Perfect Game

Ooh, it’s a bold move to do an episode of Daredevil that barely has Daredevil in it, but I don’t need to tell you guys I am completely in the can for it. Of course, I didn’t expect for a second that Matt might actually die in the river but the knowledge that he would be back – and indeed, that he made it out somehow – was enough to keep me on edge for the entire episode.

There’s a certain coolness to the FBI turning up at Matt’s house demanding he show himself, not least because that has previously been Matt’s sanctuary. Once your enemies show up there, there’s no going back to it. Fisk trying to frame Matt is a cruel way for him to take revenge, but I do wonder if he realises the extent to which Matt is trying to cut people off. Will it actually slow him down?

Foggy bringing Karen in on the matter of Matt’s alive-ness is a good way to show that the characters will be avoiding the mistakes of the past, at least. Matt might sincerely want to protect Karen, but Foggy knows from experience not to make Karen’s decisions for her. As a result, Foggy gets brought in on her secret: finally, we’re having the Wesley conversation, we might get to learn more about the darkness in Karen’s past too.

The best sequence in the episode, though, was the Kingpin’s trawl through Dex’s past. The cinematic technique of having the Kingpin watching the events unfold silently as a way of dramatising his search through audio tapes and paper files was surprisingly powerful, if only for the juxtaposition of his huge frame and predatory manner over the vulnerable and confused child version of Dex. It’s rare we talk about the ambition of a Netflix TV production, but between the long take sequence last episode and the unique spin on this flashback, it’s hard not to be impressed by just how unworkmanlike Daredevil is being.

(As a side note, I want to know as a British person: isn’t Poindexter an insult? Is this just like someone in the UK being called Pratt? It’s really distracting me.)

Of course, the guy himself – the adult Dex – is manipulated quite expertly by the Kingpin, who does what he does best: manipulates his vulnerability. We can only assume that he knew Dex would fail to reconnect with Julie in anything other than a catastrophic way. You can say this for Daredevil: it might not be quick, but every scene is advancing some plot in a non-trivial way, and we really feel the consequences of how things play out. This is a show using its time well.

Agent Nadeem is also playing straight into Fisk’s hands. I’m unsure whether he’s going to get turned or whether he’s just too dumb and eager to see the forest for the trees. I believe he’s a good guy, but I’m not sure he’s doing the right thing by trusting Fisk to the extent that he is. One thing’s for sure: he’s inches away from a much bigger story than he realises, and knowing the storyline they’re playing with here I can’t help but wonder what direction things will go in.

Comics-wise, there are a few things to note in this episode. Firstly, Felix Manning first appears as a Fixer for the Kingpin in Born Again (Daredevil #230, 1986) and dies an issue later. More excitingly, this version of Bullseye’s backstory cobbles together its own ideas with the version from Bullseye: Greatest Hits (2004) where he’s a pitcher who deliberately kills a batter with a throw, and the version from Elektra #2 (1986) where he’s a kid with precocious aiming abilities.

The name, though, comes from a Bullseye miniseries of the same name from 2011 where he, er, spends a year away from crime as a baseball pitcher. Oh, and Dex’s baseball team has the Bullseye logo as their own. Will we see him wear it? The realist in me says probably not, but the comics nerd in me would love them to just own it. Guess we’ll find out…

Read James' review of the previous episode, Blindsided, here.

This review contains spoilers.

4.1 The Virgin Gary

Watching Legends Of Tomorrow is like hanging out with your best friend. You feel better not only about them but yourself. You feel reenergised, so at ease you’re able to relax from whatever’s ailing you. You’re able to get deep and crack a lot of amazing jokes.

In case it wasn’t obvious, Legends Of Tomorrow is back in top form. This is the show we as a nation need right now. A show that isn’t caught up in darkness and is willing to have some fun while not shying away from the serious stuff when it really counts. I appreciate that while this season opener is mostly on the fun side it’s not a complete farce.

I know that last statement is incredibly subjective. For some viewers watching a unicorn eat people’s hearts while the characters steal stuff from the famous people at Woodstock will be too silly to take. I want to say I get it, but come on. People flying or running incredibly fast is totally fine but when they start cracking jokes or leaning into the silly that’s too much?

Not every show needs to be serious. In fact, I’d say Legends’ jubilant atmosphere is what helps its deeper moments land. The scene where Nate rants about his emotionally unavailable father to Mick is couched in a zany drug trip but there’s an incredible moment I hope the season builds on. As Nate moans, Mick gets more and more furious. Let’s remember, Mick’s father regularly took his anger out on him. It was so bad Mick felt nothing for burning his father alive. So when he hears Nate complain about how his dad was just kind of mean? It strikes a chord. There's a possible theme the season could run with - the various traumas people go through and the different ways it affects them. Is Mick's trauma 'worse' than Nate's and does that invalidate what Nate's gone through? Please come back to this, Legends.

Another deep moment was when Zari took Ray to see her mother. After such a wacky episode I’m glad the episode addressed what’s really going on in the world. Zari is heartbroken she can’t save her mother from what’s about to happen to people like her in present day America. Legends Of Tomorrow may not have the biggest audience ever (as they wonderfully poke fun at in some stunning fourth wall breaks) but it knows it still has a platform to talk about these issues. Like any good friend (to keep that analogy going), sometimes it's got to get real with you and remind you there are bigger issues in the world.

The plots may be silly on Legends, but the characters emotions are very grounded in reality.

Constantine is also back around full time! While he’s resisting joining the team properly, he still makes for a fun addition to shake up the dynamic of the team. I love that Sara calls him out on his dark and tortured persona and actively resists his calls for her to be the same way. The interplay between these two is what really sells Constantine as a new main character. They’re two people on the same level with somewhat similar tragic backstories. They can relate and challenge one another, which leads to great TV. 

Also, and this can’t be understated, we’re seeing two characters who both can love men and women (or really anyone it seems) getting to share scenes together. That’s incredibly rare for TV, especially since many of those scenes have nothing to do with their sexualities. It’s certainly there, Sara considers moving in with Ava and Constantine gets time for a threesome, but it’s not what defines them.

The only quibble I have with the episode is the whole 'Virgin Gary' thing. I know Legends has a lot of fun dunking on Gary (and it’s usually great) but the 'haha isn’t it wacky he’s a virgin' plot was mean spirted. For such a wonderfully inclusive show, pretty much everyone rolling their eyes at someone being a virgin is out of date. I know the series loves its old-school references but this felt like an 80s movie plot in a bad way.

Still, like hanging out with any friend you might disagree on a few things but when the good so far outweighs the bad? You’re still tight buddies. Legends Of Tomorrow is so amazing I didn’t even mention all the little things that made me smile while watching. The intro with The Beatles and Paul Revere shouting, “The British are coming!" Nate and Ray are bronies! The amazingly on point Supernatural reference?! All comedic gold.

Legends Of Tomorrow is back and we are all the better for it.

Legends Of Tomorrow season 4 starts in the UK on Wednesday the 31st of October at 8pm on Sky One. 

This review contains spoilers.

7.2 The Longbow Hunters

This week on Arrow, the Longbow Hunters are finally here, and with them they brought some sweet tech, a long overdue Diaz ass-kicking courtesy of one John Diggle, and some epic team-ups from some surprising pairs of women. The team concept came up a lot this episode – who’s on which one, does one even exist, and Diggle & Ollie’s attempts to do their best without the meaningful backup that they’re used to. After the schism of last season, an extended arc focused on healing those wounds in a real way and getting back to valuing their collective contributions could be a nice way forward.

Oliver is now navigating Slabside openly as the Green Arrow, which turns out to be a bit better than he thought it would. Oliver finds a way to keep his deal – he literally uses the shiv to get rid of York – without injuring or killing the guard, even though he’s been a rat bastard since day one. Yes, he gets the guy in huge trouble at work, but he tried other options first, and the guy deserved it for other prisoner brutality. Mostly I’m shocked that this gambit worked at all, given how crap the prison system is.

In flash-forward land, William and Roy are trying to unravel Oliver and Felicty's mysterious actions, while we try to understand how they got there from here. I sort of doubt Felicity and Ollie just ditched him for no good reason. The token Felicity left him from Thea turns out to be a GPS, and it looks like the writers are smartly doling out this storyline in small, enticing morsels – don’t saturate the episode, and leave us wanting more. I remain cautiously optimistic about whatever labyrinthine set of circumstances led both of these men to Lian Yu, and their road back to Star City.

I’ve been sceptical about Laurel’s path toward redemption, full of stutter steps and awkward backtracks as it was last season. Arrow has wisely chosen the hardest road for her, which will ultimately be more convincing to the audience: winning Dinah over. On the surface the two have so much in common, which is part of what makes their pairing so promising. The sonic dampener tech from the opening made for a cool fight with Black Siren – she wasn’t counting on two canary cries, reinforcing the notion that they can only take down Diaz and the Longbow Hunters by being a team.

While I had seen artwork and casting for the Longbow Hunters, it still surprised me to see two interesting and capable women villains, which says a lot. Here’s hoping they never sleep with Oliver Queen. With a majority women writers room and an even gender split of directors for the first time in the show's history, I just might get my wish. 

Diaz’s flame gun was cool as hell, and got even better when it turned he and Dig's fight into a flame train. Diggle was looking good out there – in a one on one fight, he nearly took Diaz out, in an incredibly satisfying beatdown. I hope more of the Longbow Hunters means more rough fights, slick tech, and visually arresting set pieces. I still have a lot of questions about our stylish new villains, namely, why does Felicity know the longbow hunters “better than anyone?”

Felicity is single-minded in her focus on Diaz, to the point where Curtis had to step in and finish the job and she walks away from Diggle and Argus so she can work with someone else whose sole focus is Diaz. Felicity’s singlemindedness is understandable, but it resurfaces an old problem: she has never been held to account for her near-constant digital espionage, and her willingness to do just about anything for Oliver, a trait that pushed her character to harm others like Curtis without thinking or ever apologizing in season 6. (Did she ever tell Curtis she blew their startup money? Isn’t that fraud? Isn’t it her fault he needs the Argus job in the first place?)

As much as I’ve struggled with the remnants of season six Felicity that are on display throughout this episode, if they were necessary to get us to this fed/felon duo, so be it. I am so here for this Agent Watson/Felicity Smoak team-up! Agent Watson was criminally underused last season (get it?) – lots of build-up, then she disappeared for most of the season and was MIA during most of the trial and cropped up for a random episode or two at the very end.

Felicity is a character I have always loved, but who hasn’t always had the writing she deserves. It’s hard for those without capes not to feel like they’re second fiddle on superhero shows, and that goes double when they’re also a female significant other of a male hero. Felicity’s intelligence, perseverance and loyalty have always been what makes her special, and this team-up seems like a great way to showcase all three qualities, outside of the authority of Oliver or Diggle. If Rene, Curtis, or anyone else comes in to help on this mission, which seems likely, they’ll be answering to Felicity and Watson. This, this I like. Season season and showrunner Beth Schwartz, keep killing it, please.

Read Delia's review of the previous episode, Inmate #4587 here.

Humanity has long been fascinated with monsters of all shapes and guises. There is, however, one monster that has held a hypnotic sway over popular culture for the past 200 hundred years: the vampire. The vampire first travelled to Western literature in John Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819. The 19th century saw them slowly infiltrate literature at all levels – from the novel Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, to the pages of penny dreadfuls. However, it wasn’t until 1897 when the vampire myth really took hold with the arrival of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula was a sensation and has continued to influence just about everything vampire-related that followed. It is a novel brimming with social anxiety, with Dracula representing everything from European migration to evolutionary fears. It is hardly surprising that the motion picture business seized upon the Count when horror made its way from page to screen. Stoker’s tale has inspired films ranging from Christopher Lee classics Taste The Blood Of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972, to lavish Anne Rice adaptations Interview With The Vampire and Queen Of The Damned.

Early films based on Stoker’s novel, chief of which was Nosferatu (1922), set the template for the way in which vampires have been presented. They are both sophisticated and animalistic, hypnotic and repulsive, tragic figures and irredeemable villains. As the vampire continued its journey through the 20th century, the deep-rooted anxieties they represented changed and diversified, leading to a broad spectrum of vampires in cinemas who are good, evil, and everything in between.

As iconic as Bela Lugosi and just as stylish in aristocrat chic, Christopher Lee took on the infamous role when Dracula made his move to Hammer. More liberated in terms of the overtly sexual aspects of Dracula and vampirism as a theme, Hammer would produce nine films related to the Transylvanian menace. Lee’s iteration of Dracula upped the charisma and charm, while never forgetting the element of horror that accompanied him. In 1970’s Taste The Blood Of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972, the lesson is don’t take part in black magic or blood-drinking ceremonies in case the Count reappears to kill you. Both Taste and A.D. 1972 make fresh strides in the genre and, as the title suggests, A.D. 1972 brings Dracula into the modern world, a move which later films would develop in order to continue the trend of using vampires to represent real-life horror. Proof, if ever it were needed, that vampires break new cinematic ground as time progresses.

By the time the 80s rolled around, vampires were no longer enigmatic castle-dwellers with a penchant for capes, but cool biker types with leather jackets, matchstick sneers, and in-vogue haircuts. Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys burst on to the pop culture landscape in 1987. Near Dark took a more found family approach to its fanged characters, but it would be The Lost Boys and its vampires-as-teen-gang nightmare that resonated most. Jason Patric’s Michael fights for the acceptance of Kiefer Sutherland’s David and his mates (hello to Alex Winter). When David offers him a mysterious, blood-red drink, Michael drinks deeply. From there, the film becomes a battle for Michael’s immortal soul, fought out between the temptation of David’s world and his younger brother Sam (Corey Haim).

The parallels to a spiral into drug addiction are easy to see in The Lost Boys; Michael withdraws, becomes moody, and takes to wearing sunglasses in the day while his body goes through all sorts of changes he doesn’t understand. Not only were the vampires cool youths, the social anxieties that they represented here were very much an aspect of wider concerns around youth culture and the potential detrimental effects. Vampires could be young and sexy now, rather than old and alluring, a trend which would crop up again and again through the 90s and into the new millennium.

In 1994, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire arrived, boasting a superstar cast in Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Christian Slater, while launching the career of Kirsten Dunst. Interview would combine all of the various elements seen in vampire movies so far – social anxiety, youth, sex, addiction – and add a healthy dose of tragedy by playing up the loneliness of the long-living vampire. Jordan’s film played with both the history and the future of the vampire figure in this respect. Lestat, played by Cruise, is every bit the dangerous, charismatic character that audiences had come to recognise.

Lestat would reappear as a rock star in 2002’s Queen Of The Damned, played by Stuart Townsend, further playing around with the vampire identity. The film also featured an iconic performance from Aaliyah (in her final screen role) as Akasha, the seductive queen and first vampire ever born. This had followed Blade in 1998 and its Guillermo del Toro-directed sequel, which also arrived in 2002. This brought a dynamic, superhero angle to the vampire myth. The character had been around in his Marvel Comics form since 1973 and here appeared in the guise of Wesley Snipes. Cemented firmly in the darker end of the vampire screen tradition, Blade was a stylised slice of modern gothic that launched a largely successful franchise.

From the templates set by these earlier films, vampires diversified even further on screen for the 21st century. Some would be the invasive, animalistic killers as in 30 Days Of Night, some the romantic tortured souls, seen in Twilight’s Edward Cullen. Twilight also controversially introduced the concept of vampires sparkling in the sunlight, but we’re not sure that’ll catch on elsewhere. And, lest we forget, vampires remain a global phenomenon. The Iranian-set A Girl Walks Home At Night explores the lonesome vampire romance from a female perspective. Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish hit Let The Right One In also looks at the isolation of vampirism through its quiet childhood relationship between human Oskar and vampire Eli.

Though it may dip in and out of fashion, the vampire myth is such an amorphous form that the monsters can be made to fit just about any metaphor or style and can represent any human anxiety. They can be lovers, friends, foes, heroes or killers, sometimes they can be all at once. They’re going to be around for a long while yet.

Few animation studios have been as consistent in their output as Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli. Founded in 1985, its animated fantasies are made with just the right blend of humour, melancholy and whimsy to make them appeal to audiences of all ages.

And while Studio Ghibli has embraced new technology in recent years - Pom Poko was the studio's first film to use CG back in 1994 - it remains committed to producing animation using largely traditional, hand-drawn techniques.

Miyazaki is back out of retirement (again) and the whole studio is hard at work on his How Do You Live?, tentatively due for release in 2020, so we're currently in a long lull between projects. So what better time to take stock of Ghibli's output and pick their best animated features...

Laputa: Castle In The Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) 1986

Borrowing the flying island concept from Jonathan Swift's 18th century satire Gulliver's Travels, Castle In The Sky was the first animated feature released under the Ghibli banner, and arguably their best. Set in an alternate Victorian era full of sky pirates and steam-powered war machines, this remains one of Miyazaki's most action-filled, plot-heavy, yet purely entertaining films.

Relating the tale of two youngsters and their attempts to find the mythical flying castle of the title (actually a gigantic, Eden-like island where nature and technology exist side-by-side), Castle In The Sky contains some stunning character and mechanical designs, not least the ethereal, faintly tragic robots that guard Laputa itself.

Miyazaki was reportedly unaware that "Laputa" is Spanish for "whore", hence Disney's decision to release the film in the west under the redacted title of Castle In The Sky.

My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) 1988

After the high adventure of Castle In The Sky, Miyazaki came back down to earth with the charming My Neighbor Totoro, a gentle and heart-warming tale of a little girl who discovers an entire forest of lively spirits.

Miyazaki has often said that he made Totoro to give city dwelling youngsters an idea of what the countryside is like, and the film certainly succeeds in imparting a feeling of wonderment that is now a Ghibli hallmark.

Its plot may be slight, but the strength of the characters, from the dust sprites, via Catbus, to the delightful, bear-like Totoro himself, invest the film with such charm that it's impossible not to be drawn in.

Grave Of The Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) 1988

A starkly different production from Totoro, Grave Of The Fireflies was directed by Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata rather than Miyazaki himself. Nevertheless, the quality of Grave's animation and character design remains dizzyingly high, and the film is a heartbreaking depiction of two children's struggle for survival in World War II Japan.

A mainstream picture that thoroughly dispels the myth that animations are for kids, Grave Of The Fireflies is, along with Mori Masaka's earlier Bare Foot Gen, one of the most affecting and intelligently paced depictions of war in an animated feature, and will leave all but the most cold hearted viewers utterly shattered by the time it draws to a close.

Kiki's Delivery Service (Majo no takkyûbin) 1989

Miyazaki returned to the fore for Kiki's Delivery Service, an altogether lighter feature about the adventures of a teenage witch and her black cat. A less memorable film than the classic Totoro, perhaps, but still packed with typical Ghibli character and charm.

Miyazaki's capacity for creating strong, likeable female lead protagonists is at the fore here.

Porco Rosso (Kurenai no buta) 1992

A film that indulges Miyazaki's love for aircraft, Porco Rosso is set in 1930s Italy, and features a pilot cursed with the head of a pig. Along with planes and strong female leads, pigs are a common motif in Miyazaki's films.

Miyazaki's enthusiasm for his subject is present in every frame, with its aerial dogfights rendered with humour, energy and staggering attention to detail.

Pom Poko (Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko) 1994

An interesting departure for Ghibli, whose films are normally broad enough to appeal to all countries, Pom Poko contains numerous Japanese cultural and religious references that could baffle unsuspecting foreign audiences.

Again directed by Isao Takahata, Pom Poko is an ecological fable about a society of shape-shifting, mischievous raccoons and their efforts to protect their forest from the urbanisation project of 60s Japan.

Notable for its surprisingly common display of testicles (it's not uncommon for raccoons to be depicted with prominent genitalia in Japanese tradition), Pom Poko is easily Studio Ghibli's most anarchic feature to date.

The spectacular animation reaches its zenith in an enchanting ghost parade sequence, and the film's often laugh-out-loud humour is undercut by a particularly stinging, unsentimental conclusion.

Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime) 1997

Miyazaki's pet themes of nature and ecology are at the forefront of Princess Mononoke, a film which the director intended to make his last until its huge success convinced him to continue working at Studio Ghibli after all.

At over two hours long, Monoke is a punishingly long feature, and its singularly melancholy, downbeat tone may prove too much for younger audience members, but in terms of character design and animation this is vintage Miyazaki.

The colossal, ethereal gods of the forest are singularly captivating creations, and the film's battle sequences are surprisingly visceral. Western distributor Disney wanted to cut the film to gain a PG rating in US cinemas, but Miyazaki quite rightly refused.

Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi) 2001

Miyazaki's most obvious touchstone for Spirited Away is surely Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, but the Japanese master places enough of his own unique ideas onto the central premise to make the picture all his own.

Chihiro is a typically strong-willed female lead who finds herself lost in a fantastical alternate world of gods, spirits and dragons. Miyazaki created perhaps his strongest fantastical character design since Totoro in the shape of No-Face, an eerie, wraith-like presence who quickly proves to be a terrible glutton once confronted with a table of supper.

The first Ghibli film to earn an Academy Award, Spirited Away remains one of Studio Ghibli's most acclaimed and lucrative releases to date.

The Cat Returns (Neko no Ongaeshi) 2002

Another Ghibli film with a female protagonist, 2002's The Cat Returns was directed by Hiroyuki Morita, an animator on such classics as Lupin III and Akira.

A slight film in comparison to the epic Sprited Away, The Cat Returns is, like so many Ghibli films, memorable for the quality of its characterisation and design, particularly that of Muta, the lugubrious, overweight feline whose appetite soon gets him into trouble.

When high school student Haru saves a cat from being run over, she finds herself drawn into an entire secret kingdom of cats.

Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo) 2008

Studio Ghibli's Ponyo feels something of a return to basics after a run of increasingly intricate films. Taking the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Little Mermaid as its basis, Ponyo relates the story of Sōsuke, a gentle nine-year-old who encounters Ponyo, the titular fish-girl of the title, while playing on a beach near his home. Actually the daughter of the Goddess of Mercy, Ponyo's decision to transform into a human proves to have destructive consequences for Sōsuke's idyllic coastal town.

Less consistently entertaining than Ghibli's earlier work (while charming, Ponyo's human persona is less well-rounded than Miyazaki's other female protagonists), there's still much to enjoy here. Sōsuke's mother is a believably flawed yet likeable character, and the depiction of the ocean floor, teeming with exotic and colourful life, is never less than dazzling.

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) 2013

Originally meant to be Miyazaki's final film (before he changed his mind and started working on How Do You Live?), The Wind Rises feels like a swansong. Beautifully elegaic and deeply personal, the film tells the true story of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter planes that played a major role in WWII. Essentially the story of Miyazaki himself, the parallels between both men are softy drawn - a tender self-portrait of an artist with his head in the clouds. The 1923 Tokyo earthquake gives the film its only real set-piece, with the rest of the story grounded in much more emotional details of Jiro's life, love and dreams. Possibly Miyazaki's least technically ambitious film, it might also be his best. 

Operatives. Spies. Moles. Infiltrators. Secret agents go by many names. In fact, Britain's national security agency doesn't even call them agents - they're covert human intelligence sources, or simply “officers".

Whatever we choose to call them, secret agents lead necessarily furtive and obscure lives - so obscure that most of what we know about them is defined by what we've seen and read in books and movies.

During the Cold War, the image of the secret agent as a well-groomed sophisticate in a suit proliferated all over the world, and even in the high-tech landscape of the 21st century, that image still stands - just look at such movies as Kingsman: The Secret Service, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and, of course, the Bond franchise. 

Then again, the following list also proves that secret agents can come in many different forms. Some have trained for the life of a spy, but many of them have the world of espionage and imminent death thrust upon them. Below you'll find plenty of famous names from the world of espionage, but we've also picked out a few other great secret agents from cinema history who, we think, deserve their own brief moment in the spotlight.

Jimmy Tong - The Tuxedo (2002)

Jackie Chan affectionately sent up the spy genre with The Tuxedo, in which he plays an ordinary taxi driver who's transformed, by a feat of technological magic, into a suave secret agent in the James Bond mould. The underlying joke is that charismatic spies like Bond get their miraculous powers of combat and seduction not from years of training and the kind of lingering self-confidence you get from going to expensive schools, but from wearing special tuxedos. The film's lightweight stuff, but Chan's gleeful take on the genre is infectious - a scene where he's frantically trying to get his high-tech trousers on while simultaneously fighting an army of bad guys is a particular highlight.

Derek Flint - Our Man Flint (1966)

Long before Top Secret! and Austin Powers, there was Our Man Flint, a send-up of the whole swinging 60s craze for spy movies. It has a crazed criminal organisation, mad scientists with a dangerous device (in this instance, a weather-altering machine) and, of course, a suave secret agent - James Coburn's Derek Flint. Coaxed out of retirement because a superior agent isn't available ("0008"), Flint's a quintessentially 60s spy - unflappable, flirty and handy with a karate chop. Coburn gives Flint an easy charm, and he's highly effective in his combat scenes. Just look at how high Coburn can kick, and try to imagine Roger Moore doing the same thing...

Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin - The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

They're from opposing sides of the Iron Curtain and forced to work together for the greater good. From the US we have the vain, calculating Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn in the U.N.C.L.E. 60s TV series and played by the four-square Henry Cavill in Guy Ritchie's movie revival. From the USSR we have Armie Hammer's Ilya Kuryakin, a towering, angrier version of the character once filled by heartthrob David McCallum. Mortal enemies at first, then reluctant partners, their constant rivalry - and spark of chemistry - is the defining element in Ritchie's glossy reboot.

Phil Coulson - Iron Man 2, Thor, The Avengers, Captain Marvel (2010-2019)

He may not have superpowers, but Agent Coulson has rapidly become one of the most popular supporting characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the major reasons for this is Clark Gregg's easy-going performance; Coulson may be an agent for one of the most powerful organisations on Earth, but he's essentially a likeable everyman. Surrounded as he is by an armoured billionaire, a god from outer space and patriotic super-soldier, Coulson provides the link between the realm of superheroes and the (relatively) everyday.

Harry Tasker - True Lies (1994)

While the James Bond series took an extended break from 1989 until the mid-1990s, Hollywood megastar Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped in to fill the breach. In James Cameron's True Lies (a remake of France's La Totale!), Schwarzenegger plays the particularly brawny Harry Tasker - a covert operative who pretends to his wife and daughter that he's a computer salesman. Tasker gets to do all the things you'd expect in a Bond pastiche - he wears a dinner suit, meets exotic ladies, and makes pithy quips after shooting bad guys. Tasker isn't the most subtle of secret agents, but he's probably one of the most creative when it comes to moments of crisis. Who else would think of riding a horse to the top of a skyscraper?

Mallory Kane - Haywire (2011)

MMA fighter Gina Carano turned action hero in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. The opening sequence tells you everything you need to know about Carano's unspeakably tough operative, Mallory Kane: despite receiving a full cup of steaming hot coffee to the face, she manages to batter Channing Tatum into a quivering huddle. A decidedly modern kind of agent, Mallory works for a private contractor, who for reasons unknown appears to have turned against her. Notably lacking in zinging one-liners though she is, Mallory's a convincingly tough character in a story full of betrayal and would-be assassins.

Harry Hart - Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

Before Kingsman came out this year, few would have imagined that Colin Firth would be so effective as a combat-ready secret agent. With his retro glasses, expensive tailoring and precise hair, Firth's Harry Hart is a spy in the 60s mould, but just wait until he's backed into a corner. As the film's heavily-publicised bar room fight scene proves, he can deliver a punch or kick as well as any modern action hero.

Agents K and J - Men In Black (1997-2012)

They're sci-fi's most recognisable odd couple. With their black suits and matching glasses, agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and reluctant partner J (Will Smith) bicker their way through the obscure jobs on the planet: keeping an eye on the activities of extraterrestrials walking our planet, without alerting the general public to their presence. The most enjoyable parts of the three Men In Black films made so far have come from K and J's strained relationship - the former terse and uptight, the latter humorous and easy-going. Even when the alien effects and action spin wildly out of control, Smith and Jones provide the franchise's rock-solid centre.

John Mason - The Rock (1996)

Even well into his 60s, Sean Connery still convinced as a gun-toting action hero. In Michael Bay's The Rock, he's essentially James Bond in all but name - there are even fan theories that John Mason is intended to be Connery's Bond, with the repeated mention of Mason's adventures as a British Intelligence operative working in the mid-60s. Caught stealing sensitive documents from the FBI, Mason is incarcerated for 33 years and eventually dug out for a new mission, older but still cool under fire and always ready with a witty retort.

Susan Cooper - Spy (2015)

It's a common approach in spy thrillers to throw an ordinary person into an extraordinary situation - for some classic examples, see Hitchcock's North By Northwest or Sidney Pollack's Three Days Of The Condor. In Spy, Melissa McCarthy's CIA desk jockey is suddenly sent on a life-or-death mission across Europe, which takes in a bomb in a suitcase, casinos, explosions and fast cars. Melissa's great value as an unlikely secret agent, and her scenes with Jason Statham, who happens to play the sweariest secret agent in film history, are a real high point.

Felix Leiter - the Bond series (1962-)

Played by a range of actors, from Jack Lord, Cec Linder and Rik Van Nutter in the 60s to Jeffrey Wright in the 2000s, Felix Leiter is best known as James Bond's contact with the CIA and one of his closest allies. Although experiencing some unpleasant situations that Bond has skilfully managed to avoid in his own career (see Ian Fleming's original Live And Let Die novel and 1989's unusually violent Licence To Kill), Leiter remains an affable counterpoint to 007's icy resolve.

Evelyn Salt - Salt (2010)

We've seen Angelina Jolie appear in action films before (see Tomb Raider and Mr & Mrs Smith), but she's superbly poker-faced as the enigmatic Evelyn Salt. We know she's some kind of spy, but whose side is she on - the US or Russia's? Director Philip Noyce and writer Kurt Wimmer keep that question dangling from Salt's beginning until almost the end, but it's Jolie's performance that keeps the story simmering: she's dangerous, sly and, perhaps, a traitor - and that's what makes her so compelling to watch.

Edgar Brodie - Secret Agent (1936)

A young John Gielgud is magnificent in this 30s thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Set in the midst of World War I, Secret Agent sees Gielgud's army captain Edgar Brodie despatched to covertly track down a German agent en route to Arabia. Under a new identity, Brodie's partnered with an assassin (the great Peter Lorre), but finds himself ill-equipped to deal with the murderous aspects of his new vocation. Gielgud plays a wonderfully British, reserved sort of spy - a striking counterpoint to the increasingly tough agents we'd see in the later thrillers of the 20th century.

Lorraine Broughton - Atomic Blonde (2017)

The best thing about Atomic Blonde is that it gave us a chance to see what John Wick might look like as a secret agent, instead of dog-avenging hitman. Very much playing her own game in the film - trading partners against each other, bamboozling both sides of the Iron Curtain at the same time, MI6 agent Broughton's key asset is her knack for action. Taking a stiletto heel to the throat of Britain's enemies (literally), Broughton is one of the most relentless spies around. She doesn't blend in that well, but she doesn't really have to when she fights like that. 

Bruce Lee - Enter The Dragon (1973)

Okay, so Bruce Lee isn't trained as a secret agent in his final and most famous film, but Enter The Dragon does see him hired by a British Intelligence agent to go on a top-secret mission, so he still just about qualifies. Lee also gets to indulge in all the activities you'd expect from a seasoned spy; under the pretext of entering a martial arts tournament, he infiltrates the island lair of an evil villain named Han. There, he engages in moonlit reconnaissance missions, uncovers a huge drug operation, and engages the cat-stroking Han (Shih Kien) in mortal combat. With many plot points seemingly taken directly from Dr No, Enter The Dragon could have been the start of a Bond-like martial arts spy franchise for Lee. Tragically, the star died on the 20th July 1973 - just six days before Enter The Dragon appeared in cinemas.

Jack Ryan - The Hunt For Red October - Jack Ryan (1990-)

Played by no fewer than five actors across five films and one Amazon TV show, Jack Ryan is arguably author Tom Clancy's most famous creation. Ostensibly a CIA analyst, Ryan inevitably ends up in the thick of the action, whether he's on the trail of a stolen soviet submarine, saving members of the British royal family from assassins or foiling terrorist plots. To date, Harrison Ford's incarnation of Ryan is arguably the best; he's smart, tenacious and, despite his tendency to use his brain rather than his fists to win his battles, still capable of holding his own in a violent encounter. Still John Krasinski is more than holding his own in the TV show, and the second season could, maybe, see him topple Ford. 

Alec Leamas - The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965)

Richard Burton brings a wonderfully bitter, grim edge to Alec Leamas, a British agent caught in an intelligence intrigue in the midst of the Cold War. Based on the novel by John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold depicts the soul-destroying downside of life as a spy, a profession where you're never quite sure who you can trust and where moral boundaries are murky at best.

Ethan Hunt - Mission: Impossible (1996-)

Sharing Bond's cheerful disregard for his own safety, Ethan Hunt is the grinning daredevil of modern action cinema. But Hunt is also a master of disguise and a cunning tactician - how else can he so reliably get into high-tech, impossibly fortified buildings? Ably assisted by his ever-changing team of agents (most regularly Simon Pegg's Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames' Luther Stickell) Hunt is perhaps the least conflicted of screen spies. He lacks the inner darkness of Bond or the identity crisis of Bourne, and while his appetite for danger might suggest a self-destructive edge, there's always the sense that he's in the spy game merely for the thrill of the chase.

Joe Turner - Three Days Of The Condor (1975)

Spies and secret agents are necessarily closed-off, elusive sorts, so making them into interesting characters is a difficult task for any writer or actor. Thanks to amalgam of both great writing, acting and direction, Joe Turner emerges as one of the most watchable agents of film history. Robert Redford plays him as a CIA analyst utterly unprepared for the world of violence and murder thrust upon him. "I'm not a field agent," he protests down the phone to his superiors at the CIA. "I just read books!" In a film pregnant with paranoia and the constant threat of danger, Redford's on career-best form here.

Gunther Bachmann - A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Where Ian Fleming's spy novels were about the glamour and fantasy of the spy game, John le Carré's books are closer to the mundane, downbeat reality. The author's 2008 book of the same name found the perfect counterpart in director Anton Corbijn, whose stark photography is perfect for the concrete greyness of this low-key thriller. But most of all, Philip Seymour Hoffman is ideal casting as the crumpled, weary Gunther Bachman, the leader of an undercover counter-terrorist unit. Gravel-voiced and glum, Hoffman's impeccable (and tragically, final) performance leads us into a tangled world of surveillance and intrigue.

Nikita - La Femme Nikita (1990)

What makes Nikita so watchable is its lead character's reluctance to become an agent and undercover state assassin. Initially a drug-addled drop-out, Nikita (Anne Parilaud) is given a stark choice: either train to become an operative or die in prison. The result is an action twist on Pygmalion, as the wayward Nikita gradually transforms herself into a deadly fighting machine. What makes the character so believable isn't just Parilaud's prowess in her action scenes, but her vulnerable ordinariness: one protracted gun fight sees her leap from danger and land in a trash-filled dumpster. Her performance brings grit and humour to director Luc Besson's glossy action.

Alicia Huberman - Notorious (1946)

Before Nikita, Evelyn Salt or Mallory Kane, there was Ingrid Bergman's stellar performance as Alicia Huberman. In Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Notorious, Alica's the daughter of a convicted German spy who is herself pressed into service as an agent for the Americans. Sent to Brazil to infiltrate a group of Nazis, Alicia's soon caught between the affections of Devlin (Cary Grant), an ice-cold US agent, and Sebastian (Claude Rains) one of the Nazis she's ordered to seduce. A superbly drawn character, her inner strength offset by her capacity for drink, Alicia's one of the earliest - and still most interesting - secret agents in film.

Jason Bourne - the Bourne series (2002-)

As embodied by Matt Damon, Jason Bourne felt like a breath of fresh air when he first appeared in 2002. Sure, he's an indescribably tough former agent with the kind of skills that most of us could only dream of, but his amnesia and grim past mark him out as an underdog worth rooting for. And at a time when the Bond franchise was becoming increasingly mired in implausible gadgets (see Die Another Day's invisible car - or rather, don't), Bourne's tendency to fight with pens and books, or drive around in battered old cars, marked him out as a very different kind of hero. As an example of just how important Damon's incarnation of Bourne is to the series, look no further than 2012's The Bourne Legacy. Jeremy Renner does his best as Aaron Cross, but an agent in constant need of brain-boosting pills is no replacement for Bourne and his ever-present identity crisis.

George Smiley - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Another adaptation of a John le Carré spy novel, this one with an all-star cast which includes Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt and Benedict Cumberbatch. Towering over them all is Gary Oldman as British Intelligence officer George Smiley, an operative whose skills are cerebral rather than athletic. He's a noble character whose face is lined with a subtle yet profound undercurrent of regret. Just look at the scene Smiley shares with Benedict Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam. "We both spend our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems," he observes, ruefully.

Deservingly, Oldman was nominated for an Academy Award for his outstanding turn here.

Harry Palmer - The Ipcress File (1965)

Michael Caine brings a brilliantly brash, abrasive edge to Harry Palmer, the hero he first played in The Ipcress File. So much of Palmer's character goes against the grain of the typical 60s spy. He's working class, not upper crust; he wears glasses and relatively casual clothes, enjoys cooking, and his dry humour clearly irks his more refined superiors. Caine is perfect for this early attempt to capture the grittier, more prosaic side of life as a spy, and the allure of the character was such that he played the character four more times - in the sequels Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, and in the 1990s thrillers Bullet To Beijing and Midnight In Saint Petersburg. It was The Ipcress File that saw Caine at the height of his powers, and with his turn cut to John Barry's prowling theme tune, it's among the best British spy thrillers ever made. As Nigel Green's upper-crust Major Dalby puts it, "You're just too hot, Palmer."

James Bond (1962-)

Shaken but not stirred, often imitated but never bettered. Since his big screen debut in Dr No, James Bond has formed part of the cultural landscape - his choice of clothing, taste in booze and witticisms are recognised (and parodied) the world over. For more than 50 years, Bond has embodied the romance of being a secret agent, while the best films have brought out more than a hint of its dark side, too - Sean Connery brought out the flinty streak present in Ian Fleming's novels, even as the later films continuously upped the one-liners and action set-pieces. Like any spy worth his salt, Bond has survived by taking on different forms: the imposing, rugged Connery, the urbane, laid-back Roger Moore, the introspective, street-tough Daniel Craig.

Unlike the movies adapted from the novels by John le Carre or Len Deighton, Bond deals with the seductive fantasy of spy craft rather than the mundane, soul-sapping reality. But therein lies Bond's almost universal appeal: 007's stock in trade may be death and destruction, but the glamorous circles in which he moves are a world away from the desk jobs, coffee machines and daily grind of we ordinary mortals.

Consistently marred by behind the scenes drama and sky-high expectations, Bohemian Rhapsody is finally ready to be seen by Queen superfans and curious moviegoers alike. Unfortunately, despite great work from a lot of people, the film never feels daring or honest enough to please either.

The film tells snippets of the story of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s (Rami Malek) life, from his youth in Middlesex as a Parsi immigrant to his days in music and beyond. We see him meet Brian May (Gwilym Lee), Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) and form the band, write and release celebrated hit songs such as the titular Bohemian Rhapsody, and eventually be subsumed by fame and diagnosed with AIDS in the late-80s.

You’ve seen the pictures and flicked through the trailer - you don’t need anyone to tell you that Rami Malek is a dead ringer for Mercury and has managed, against expectations, to capture some of the legendary stage presence that the star was famous for. He is absolutely brilliant, and there’s never a moment you don’t believe that Mercury’s voice isn’t truly coming out of his body. It’s a nifty magic trick, and it works.

The film has not had the easiest journey to the screen even if you ignore the various casting changes. Brian Singer was fired as director after alleged unprofessional behaviour on set and separate accusations of sexual assault came to light, but DGA rules have meant that his name remains despite the work of replacement Dexter Fletcher. This provides a legitimate argument for boycotting Bohemian Rhapsody, which is a stance you sense the film wants to get ahead of.

But more than anything, this feels like a film made by Queen, so reticent is it of the man at its core. Sacha Baron Cohen famously departed the project several years ago because his vision clashed with the band’s, and several actors were sought before Malek landed the gig.

All of the ‘less mainstream’ parts of Mercury’s life might be here in one way or another, in the background or over in the corner, but they’re so surface level that they’re barely addressed. One of the film’s best sequences is the one that tackles Mercury’s relationship with the press, who were so eager to pry into a life that would inevitably be twisted and distorted by a public not ready to hear it.

The film’s main problem arises later with how infantilised Mercury becomes. Nothing is his fault, and his bad actions are simply the result of him falling in with the wrong people. He might let fame go to his head, but more than anything he’s a sad, lonely puppet of evil record execs and assistants (Allen Leech, practically twirling his moustache and cackling). That may be the perspective of his friends, who are sadly the only ones here to offer their account, but it sells the man short.

The straight-washing allegations, however, seem even stickier after seeing the film. It was always going to be a difficult line to tread when depicting the complicated sexuality of a complicated real-life person, because to some the prioritisation of Mercury’s relationship with ex-fiance and life-long friend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) will smack of the film’s writers not wanting to focus too much on the singer’s relationships with men. Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) is introduced later, but he’s a footnote.

In reality, Mercury was quoted many times as saying that Mary was the most important person in his life, and it’s their odd, tender relationship that works best throughout the film.

The smartest decision of all, and the thing that saves the film in the end, is the choice to finish with Live Aid. Ending the film with Mercury’s illness and death would have felt cheap and unnecessary, misery porn for the few people who don’t know how the star’s life ultimately panned out. Live Aid is a joyous sequence which runs and runs for almost the entire 20-minutes (the whole set was filmed, but cut slightly for the theatrical release) and is as much a reason to watch the film in cinemas as any.

In the end, Bohemian Rhapsody is a much too-precious advertisement for Queen (who are still touring) that just happens to have a spectacular performance at its centre. Perhaps a happy accident, but no surprise for those familiar with the actor’s work on Mr Robot, it’s Malek that’ll stick in the mind when walking out of the film. That, and the impulse to go stream Queen’s greatest hits.

Bohemian Rhapsody is in UK cinemas from October 24th.

I was a nonchalant abductee. I wasn’t exactly scrambling up the side of a mountain or on a bridge gawping at bright lights or partying at the top of the Empire State. It took the cumulative power of a second watch of Kumail Nanjiani’s reference-strewn rom com The Big Sick, the online hype for season eleven and Amazon Prime Video’s recommendations for me to turn to my sister, one cold February night, and say, on a whim, nonchalantly, hopefully, “Let’s watch the pilot of The X-Files?”

That was me gone. When a young Special Agent Dana Scully knocked on Fox Mulder’s office door in the basement of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building twenty-five years ago, she was not adequately informed of what joining The X-Files was getting her into and twenty-five years later, neither was I.

Where I went

I say I was abducted, let me be more clear. I mean my pop culture tastebuds were abducted. Mulder and Scully experience nine minutes of missing time in the pilot. I can’t account for nine months.

When the central UFOs and aliens mystery of The X-Files was laid out, and it was several times, I still felt that I wasn’t quite done with this story. Questions were left unanswered, business unfinished, tension - somehow - left unresolved. Was I trying to reveal further mysteries of a TV show outside the TV show itself? Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing.

One of the first strong feelings I had was that I was definitely going to read Moby Dick. A Scully family text, it’s first referenced in Glenn Morgan and James Wong’s season one episode Beyond The Sea - Scully calls her Navy captain father Ahab, he calls her Starbuck. Then in Season 3’s Quagmire by Kim Newton, there’s a brilliant, fan famous, conversation on a rock (written by Darin Morgan) about whether or not Mulder is the “monomaniacal” Captain Ahab. We also find out that Scully has named her new, adorable dog Queequeg, after the harpoonist in the whale hunt novel, a joke that becomes much, much funnier when you meet the original. I also liked the sound of Moby Dick because it’s known for people who are very influenced by the book but have never actually finished it.

I never finished it. But I’m about four hundred pages in (out of six hundred and thirty) and almost every chapter is one to savour. Also, the first one hundred pages are unexpectedly really funny. I can’t randomly quote it but I can just about remember Mulder’s favourite line on the spot: “Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling.” In context on the page, this is a sick burn from Herman Melville, the 1850s equivalent to one of Mulder’s better puns.

Of course, I did all the obvious things too. I googled cryptozoology. I was transfixed by a rewatch of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, a huge influence on The X-Files creator Chris Carter. I found John Carpenter’s Antarctic research station horror The Thing, from 1982, after seeing Ice, Morgan and Wong’s Season 1 homage/remake. It works beautifully. My flatmate fell asleep on the couch when I made him watch Ed Wood’s 1956 Plan 9 From Outer Space, i.e. the 'worst film ever made', late at night, in black and white on YouTube. Mulder’s got it on the TV - for the 42nd time - when Scully walks in mid-way through David Duchovny’s Hollywood AD from season seven.

In the months after I’d watched all (most of) the original nine seasons, I blitzed through the first four seasons of Californication which sees Duchovny delighting in playing asshole writer Hank Moody, and two mini seasons of Gillian Anderson as Detective Stella Gibson in serial killer drama The Fall. And sure, it’s nice to see the actors you’ve come to like doing other stuff and I enjoyed both shows but neither quite scratched the thematic itch.

Signals and spin-offs

By the summer of my cosmic kidnapping I found myself on a sort of anti-algorithmic odyssey, with all strings on the virtual pinboard leading back to The X-Files. I was seeking out influences and tangents, quick hits like The Springfield Files on The Simpsons; the paranormal instalments of BuzzFeed Unsolved; Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius (more Simpsons); the 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.

I remembered that I like to work for things, make discoveries. Sometimes I felt the pop of a Mulder finding the Japanese translation of ‘Osu’ (in Vince Gilligan’s season three episode Pusher), other times the vibe was more Roy Neary pushing mashed potato around his plate, insisting “This means something, this is important.”

The show also served as a signal in the noise of online recommendations, even when I wasn’t looking. In June, I spotted a story in The Guardian on a graphic novel about the 30s/40s New York crime scene photography of Weegee, the alias of Arthur Fellig. I clicked because it sounded familiar. It sounded familiar because Vince Gilligan based his Season 6 episode Tithonus on the detail that Fellig - here Alfred and immortal - always seemed to be at the scene of murders before the cops. I bought Weegee: Serial Photographer by Max de Radigues and Walter Mannaert and fell for the pages of Weegee staging victims and developing photos in the trunk of his car.

I couldn’t find the only true spin-off The Lone Gunmen anywhere but YouTube. I tried the pilot, which freakily predicted a plane flying into the Twin Towers six months before it happened in 2001, thereby providing material for conspiracy theorists, not just portraying three of them. Incidentally JJ Abrams’ Fringe, considered by some a successor to The X-Files, contains a parallel world with an iconic shot of the Twin Towers still standing. From what I’ve seen of Fringe, years ago, it’s perfectly fine sci-FBI but no contest. I haven’t got to Carter’s Millennium or Harsh Realm yet and maybe never will. But it’s nice to know there’s 12 more episodes of the very silly The Lone Gunmen hanging out online.

There are some gaps when it comes to influences on The X-Files mainly because I just don’t have time for another full-blown, multi-season addiction this year and also because this is my obsession and I’ll follow the threads I want. I’ve watched a couple of Twilight Zones. I’ve watched clips of Clarice Starling, a proto-Dana Scully, in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence Of The Lambs but not rewatched the whole thing. I should probably check out the 70s show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, another big inspiration for Carter. I’ve seen some but not all of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks so that might be next - Duchovny pops up as DEA Agent Denise Bryson.

When I’m ready, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad is on my Netflix list - I was being contrary when it came out but I love all of Gilligan’s episodes including season six’s Drive with Bryan Cranston - and Frank Spotnitz’s alt-Hitler-history The Man In The High Castle is on my Prime Video one. This thing isn’t exactly over.

The mythology

I’m not naturally a crime person, it has to be The Jinx/The Wire levels of greatness, I’ve never even listened to Serial. I flirted with the shipping stuff considering The X-Files can be consumed as an excruciatingly paced period romance to rival Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion and blogs like TVMouse are very witty companions. But if I had to boil it down, I’d say my preoccupation with The X-Files is really to do with how it treats myths, symbols and storytelling, real high brow stuff. And that’s where I got it bad for this show. Really bad.

So bad I’d be clicking on individual episodes on Darren Mooney’s The M0vie Blog, which should come with a health warning, to find out just how well read the Ten Thirteen Production team is. So bad I watched the 1996 Richard Dawkins’ lecture ‘Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder’ in which he bemoans the fact that even though The X-Files is fictional, and sets up Mulder as believer and Scully as skeptic, “week after week, the rational explanation loses” in favour of fantasy. So bad I may have watched Alien Autopsy: Fact Or Fiction? a ridiculous Fox doc (currently on Netflix) which Dawkins was railing against, referenced in season three’s Nisei and exposed as a hoax after it aired.

The X-Files is interested in spirituality but I’ve always been more into myths. The long running UFO and alien colonisation plotlines have long been referred to by the creators and fans as the ‘mythology’ and Carter and his writers are never afraid to reach for big themes and symbols. Frankenstein is everywhere in The X-Files, not just Season 5’s The Post-Modern Prometheus, and who knows if that nudged me into watching both the 2018 Mary Shelley and the 1931 Bride Of Frankenstein. Anyone into The Handmaid’s Tale should check out the sometimes feminist, sometimes problematic, reproductive Scully storylines, at least until it goes off the deep end.

The Wizard Of Oz, something I haven’t thought about since I was twelve, pops up in season six’s Triangle and The Rain King. I’m not into baseball or veganism so I took a chance on David Duchovny’s recent novel Miss Subways which turned out to be charming, jam-packed with Irish myths, NYC ennui and a wonderfully weird heroine. After I was done, I spent 90p on The Only Jealousy Of Emer, a play by W.B Yeats on which Miss Subways is based, racing through twenty-four illuminated Kindle pages. Fewer birds, more melancholy at the source.

The real eyes to the sky stuff has come from Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with A Thousand Faces, an influence on the Morgan brothers and Duchovny’s input on the character of Mulder and his family’s involvement in the conspiracy. The Hero’s Journey is far from unknown in Hollywood, I knew it was George Lucas’ jam when he was creating Luke Skywalker but until my X-Files bender, I hadn’t sat down to read the whole damn thing. Then there I am nodding along at the “astonishing consistency” with which heroes are the king’s son - Skywalker, Fox Mulder, Jesus etc. Turns out this trope just means what we’re looking for is probably already hidden within, waiting to be rediscovered, even in a show which tells us ‘The truth is out there.’

Stories in stories

It might be cliched but it’s Vince Gilligan’s season five vampire ep Bad Blood and Darin Morgan’s outrageous season three Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, each with multiple, trickster narratives, that stuck with me. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 Rashomon (rewatched) frequently comes up as an influence, though Gilligan namechecks The Dick Van Dyke Show for completists. The character Lord Kinbote in Jose Chung shouts out the fictional editor Charles Kinbote in Vladmir Nabokov’s mindblowing 1962 novel Pale Fire which may be my favourite X-Files related find. Both the semi-spoof episode and the playful edition of poetry and commentary, let’s call it, got me basically high on some serious postmodern thrills. And when it comes to thoughtful criticism, Community and Rick And Morty creator Dan Harmon talking about Jose Chung on episode thirty-seven of Kumail Nanjiani’s The X-Files Files podcast might as well be poetry itself.

Getting to Gilligan’s season seven episode X-Cops, shown entirely as footage of an edition of reality show Cops, featuring Mulder, Scully and a demon, reminded me of BAN, the season one BET Network ep of Donald Glover’s show Atlanta. And it was found footage director Max Landis, talking about X-Cops, again on The X-Files Files, who led me to the Secure Contain Protect Foundation, a 4,000+ strong collection of short stories presented as “special containment procedure” reports on anomalous objects, people and places.

As for TV mythologies, I’d heard of the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, that hundreds of shows exist in the same universe as 80s medical show St. Elsewhere whose finale closed with the reveal that it was all the dream of one Tommy Westphall. But once I learned that The X-Files is involved via a crossover from Detective John Munch (Homicide: Life On The Street, Law And Order: SVU) I was all in. Will I watch all four hundred and nineteen shows in the Tommy Westphall Universe master list? Probably not?

My own personal conspiracy theory

The thing about conspiracy theories is that they’re only conspiracy theories as long as the rest of the world doesn’t believe you. The real quest isn’t finding the connections, it’s finding out which connections have meaning or can be given meaning, from within or without, and how much what the rest of the world believes matters to you.

Because look, I could tell you, feverishly, that the season three The X-Files episode Syzygy stars Lisa Robin Kelly as telekinetic teen Terri Roberts and that Lisa Robin Kelly would go on to play Laurie Forman in That '70s Show from 1998 and in season five of That '70s Show, Kelso, played by Ashton Kutcher, sings a riff on the song American Pie - “So bye, bye Mr. Stephen Hyde” - and that American Pie, written in 1971 by Don McLean, was inspired by the death of Buddy Holly and who else died in that February 1959 plane crash with Buddy Holly but The Big Bopper, a fact pointed out by one reluctant psychic in the season three The X-Files episode... Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.

What does that mean? It means that when I listened to a Studio 360 podcast about American Pie, I had The X-Files on the brain. All things considered that’s not exactly surprising. All Things is a season seven episode written and directed by Gillian Anderson. I can’t stop.

Finding this show in 2018

Whatever took hold of me in February could only have happened in the 2010s. It was nostalgic for the 'long 90s'. I’d never watched The X-Files back then, I was still in single digits, but I remember a scene or two of UFOs and monsters from my dad watching it on the TV in the front room. I quickly realised this year that everyone my age has seen Stranger Things and no-one I know has seen The X-Files.

It’s been entirely digital - so far. I may buy the box sets at some point for the bonus features, but I’ve watched extras and bloopers and interviews on YouTube. The only physical objects relating to The X-Files in my flat are Darren Mooney’s definitive Opening The X-Files book and a black ‘Mulder It’s Me’ t-shirt that I’m pretty sure I’ve lost. Kumail’s The X-Files Files, my call to adventure, is locked away in a podcast app on my phone.

It’s seriously meta. For me there has been no gap between watching vintage season one episodes and seeing present day David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson OTT goof-smooching on Jimmy Kimmel. The last thing: it’s over. Becoming of a fan of a TV show that was gone for years then returned then was over again six weeks after you got into it is... odd.

My cultural tastes have just about returned to baseline. Still, this is a fandom with lasting consequences. The chances of me visiting Vancouver, where the first five atmospheric seasons were filmed, have shot up. One of my friends might name his future child Fox Mitha (I want to believe). Just to be clear I am free to have things like a job and friends and plans. In fact next summer I’ll be flying to Bermuda for a wedding. On the flight over there, though, I’d be a damn fool not to spend forty-five minutes watching season six Mulder’s Nazi adventures on the Queen Anne in the Bermuda Triangle. So can we really say for sure that I’ve been returned?

What makes a film noir? A world-weary detective, a mysterious woman, and organised crime can all play a part. Some might swear that it’s all about a deep sense of disillusionment, or cool jazz, or even wearing hats.

But perhaps in its modern form it’s more of a feeling, a tangible awareness of light and dark and how that’s shown on screen. It occurs to me that another reason crime and science fiction fit together so well is because neither are strict in their definitions; steal a little bit from one and something else from the other, mix them together, and you’ll end up with something that contains familiar elements and yet is able to make new statements, and ask new questions, that resonate for the next generation of genre audiences.

It’s interesting how some of those elements translate so easily to science fiction while other aspects raise an entirely new set of questions.

For instance, back in the film noirs of the 1940s and 50s it would have been inconceivable for our hero not to smoke. Look at the thick smoke hanging in the light from the projector in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) or the silhouette of Robert Mitchum, the cigarette smoke rising up and out of the French windows, in Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of the Past (1947) – it was often used as an excuse for intimacy between lovers, the camera closing in on the lips, or to bring movement to a still frame. Great directors used it as a language of its own, and it must be really difficult to decide to not use that language, as a contemporary director, if you’re making a film that deliberately uses noir elements.

Cigarettes also get a lot of screen love in a different genre that paid homage to film noir: the French New Wave. These movies of the late 1950s/1960s often featured all the classic elements of noir, but science fiction was rarely an inspiration – except in the case of Alphaville (1965). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, it told the tale of Lemmy Caution, a secret agent wearing a hat and a trenchcoat, trying to destroy a city-controlling super-computer.

Does he smoke nonchalantly while carrying out his mission? Of course he does. Lemmy Caution is a character who belongs to the past; he usually appeared in detective novels and films, drinking and smoking heavily while solving cases set in the mid-twentieth century. His transportation wholesale, with all of his addictions in tow, to a dystopian city of the future makes for a fascinating change.

The further we go into the future, the more smoking comes with its own set of complications for the modern audience. We know things about it that a 1940s audience did not, and that has soured our relationship with the screen cigarette. This leaves tough choices for writers and directors who are fans of noir. To smoke, or not to smoke? If a story is set on a recognisable version of Earth then it either has to let the detective protagonist smoke with the dated freedom of Lemmy Caution, or use our current complex relationship with the cigarette. The Fifth Element (1997), Luc Besson’s vivid space adventure, features Bruce Willis as a monosyllabic hard-boiled ex-Special Forces taxi driver who smokes, naturally. But in this cramped, packaged future only four cigarettes are allowed per day; a little machine on the wall dispenses the rations. It’s a great detail in a visually exciting film.

John Constantine is another trench-coat wearing, chain-smoking investigator, starting in comics from The Saga Of Swamp Thing, throughout Hellblazer; then he and his habit made the leap to both film and television. Dangerous Habits, a 1991 six-part story written by Garth Ennis with art by Will Simpson, decided to use his nicotine addiction as an integral part of the plot - his diagnosis with terminal lung cancer. Part of this storyline then appeared in the 2005 movie version, Constantine, with Keanu Reeves playing the detective.

Constantine and his habit live on, still appearing in all sorts of places. Recently, to publicise the short-lived Amazon television series, a three minute Claymation film was made of the character called John Con Noir. It manages to fit in pretty much every noir characteristic you can think of, including a back alley, cool jazz, a deadpan monologue, a femme fatale, and a slow smoking of a cigarette. It’s compressed noir for those who like it quick.

A cigarette can effectively represent the past when creating a very challenging future. Tade Thompson’s novel with noir elements, Rosewater (2016), is set mainly in Nigeria in 2066. Telepath detective Kaaro works for a corrupt government in a city that has sprung up around a mysterious alien dome. This is a complex and involving story about how humanity and technology might interact, and there’s a great moment in the middle of all the action when Kaaro, caught up in a dangerous situation, sits and down and purposefully smokes “an ancient pack of Benson & Hedges”. Thompson takes time to describe the taste of the cigarette, and the curling smoke. It’s a pause before the action, but it’s also a grounding in this story’s noir roots at just the right moment, before pressing on into demanding territory.

You can conjure up the visual effect of the curl of smoke drifting across the scene without having to resort to a cigarette at all. For instance, the movie version of Watchmen (2009) highlights the noir angle of Rorschach’s storyline above all else, but the character wears a full face mask. So smoke rises from other places such as the street vents to fill the screen. It’s a stylish substitute. Incidentally, there’s a purely black and white version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original graphic novel that is sold as Watchmen Noir– although to be honest simply removing the colour to make something ‘noir’ feels a bit reductive to me. The character of Rorschach remains the essence of nihilism, walking the bleak city streets in or out of colour.

Part Three of SF Noir Addictions will explore stronger drugs in science fiction detective films, television series and novels.

Animals have been our companions for millennia, but what happens when nature… goes bad? Some of cinema’s scariest moments come from creatures who have become freakishly intelligent, aggressive, or large, normally as a result of human experimentation. (If movies have taught us anything, it’s that scientific progress is to be frowned upon.) Other times, it’s simply that our reckless disregard for the natural order means a clash between man and beast; a fair fight only if we have guns, fireballs, and industrial-strength pesticides.

While the likes of Jaws and Arachnophobia create hauntingly iconic scenes that spring to mind at inopportune moments in your life (paddling in the sea, eating popcorn etc), glorious counterparts to these classics are to be found in the cinematic bargain bin. Sometimes a straight-up thriller becomes a B-movie simply with the passage of time, as the animatronic monster becomes less terrifying and more ludicrous. How do you know if you’re watching a B-movie? The deaths aren’t morose and chilling, they’re hilarious.

Without further ado, here are 25 of the best murderous animals to grace the B-movie screen (and if you’re wondering why there are no sharks in the list, they’re all here).

25. Strays (1991)

A bit of a horror-by-numbers, this one. Family moves into a big new house, creepy things start happening, husband is allergic to cats, yada yada. They have problems with strays almost immediately, but nobody takes it seriously – “We’re talking about a cat, get a grip on yourself!” – and soon things have come to a yowling, spitting, growling climax. People try desperately to get water onto the cats as if this is actually a magical antidote to feline attack.

Our fear of cats’ spooky reputation was also exploited in The Uncanny (1977) in which Peter Cushing and Ray Milland head a cast of people who are forever screaming while being covered in cats, while Uninvited (1988) stars a mutant cat running amok on a luxury yacht.

24. Inanimate/Harbinger Down (2015)

I’m cheating, because just like ultimate B-movie The Blob, this concerns alien bacteria rather than animals. It’s discovered by a submarine crew, leading to shape-shifting monsters taking over people’s bodies. Think Alien crossed with The Thing and a dash of Tremors-style special effects. Then imagine cheap sets and bad acting and voila! It may not be a 'good' film, but when it comes to ridiculous, quotable lines it’s in a league of its own.

A sample:

“Pull a knife on my ship and I’ll gut you with it.”
“We have as much money as the Vatican and almost as many lawyers.”
“If you throw one more tantrum I’ll bite your goddamn nose off.”
“There’s a lot more goo than we thought!”
“Keep that nitrogen pointed at me!”
“Freeze melts. Fire is forever.”
And my personal favourite: “You don’t just jump into these sort of things hickety pickety.”

In a similar vein, I can’t NOT mention David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975); the parasites fit all too neatly into a list of the unintentionally comical.

23. Dogs (1976)

Casually insulting your average monster screenplay, one character explains “giant ants and scorpions and lizards are just products of an ignorant screenwriter who never took biology”. He’s lecturing students on the “hive mind” which makes creatures like ants work towards a single purpose. Lucky other animals don’t do the same, right? Oh.

Local dogs begin mutilating farm animals, and it’s not long before humans are on the menu. (It’s easy to sneak into people’s homes, because SO MANY women leave the back door open when showering, don’t they?) Despite a dog show ending in pandemonium, the film lacks the standard climax: what are you going to do, shoot all the dogs in the world?

Fans may enjoy Night Of The Wild (2015) and Man’s Best Friend (1993) infamous for a scene in which a genetically engineered mastiff swallows a cat whole, anaconda-style.

22. The Devil Bat (1940)

Vintage horror films could have filled this entire list; there’s an abundance of pre-CGI movies with fantastic monsters (normally some kind of giant insect or sea creature) so I will simply say this: if it’s black and white and has 'monster', 'devil' or 'Attack of the Killer-' in the title, it’s going to be a winner.

This little gem features a giant bat who can kill with one swoop to the jugular. His mad scientist creator is a murderer who tricks people into wearing a scent which attracts and enrages the freakishly large and screamy creature. With lines like “If half what I suspect is true it’s the most diabolical plot that a madman ever concocted!” this is an unmissable retro treat. Giant bats also feature in such classics as Bats: Human Harvest (2007) and Fangs (2002).

21. Wild Beasts (1984)

Real animals were used in this 'zoo inhabitants go crazy when accidentally drugged' story. While a remake would no doubt feature special effects and gory deaths, this looks like maybe Italian safety laws weren’t particularly strict and some animals were just set upon others while director Franco Prosperi pointed a camera at them.

The dangers are fairly imaginative: it’s no good having a car to escape when you’re being chased by a cheetah! A courting couple are eaten by rats, elephants invade an airport runway, and a tiger terrorises subway passengers. The highlight of the film is the school containing screaming small children and a polar bear. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it turns out that not only animals drank that PCP-laced water...

1978 TV movie The Beasts Are On the Streets covers similarly amusing ground as zoo animals escape and invade hospitals, carnivals etc.

20. Beyond Loch Ness/Loch Ness Terror (2008)

Sadly there are no Hollywood z-listers attempting Scottish accents; although they have pilfered the name of Nessie the action actually takes place in the States. Booo!

Lake Superior is inhabited by a prehistoric monster, who apparently travelled from Loch Ness via those convenient under-sea tunnels. Perhaps it came in search of James Murphy (Brian Krause), who encountered the beast decades earlier when it chomped up his father in Scotland. Murphy is now the mysterious stranger who has come to town in search of unknown animals (his title as a cryptozoologist is explained multiple times, presumably because the producers were not expecting the average viewer to be comfortable with big words. It may not a totally unfair assumption.) The CGI is more Walking With Dinosaurs than Jurassic Park, but that’s all part of the fun, along with Nessie attacks which leave people surprised by their missing appendages.

19. Empire Of The Ants (1977)

If you’ve ever wanted to see Joan Collins get ant pheromones puffed into her face to brainwash her into accepting her new insect queen’s authority, you’ve come to the right place. Collins starts the film trying to convince a boatload of people to invest in island property, never guessing that radioactive waste will have created an army of giant ants. What are the chances that such a small island would be home to a sugar factory? There’s a lot of screaming in this film (one actress actually dislocated her jaw from her exertions) and certain scenes may remind you of Honey I Shrunk The Kids, but the H.G. Wells story gets a fun update with the 'hypnotic ants' angle.

For an Oscar-winning alternative, try Them (1954).The tale of enormous mutant ants created by atomic testing is considered one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.

18. It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955)

Released as a double feature alongside Creature With The Atom Brain, this may have been a B-movie with impressive special effects at the time, but it has become a bona fide (cult) classic. Stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen used his own special brand of animation (known as dynamation) to sandwich the octopus model into a live action shot – prior to this, actors had to be content to film their reaction shots separately, and occasionally wrestle with puppets. Dynamation made those scenes of people being chased down by an colossal angry octopus look ALL TOO REAL.

Overly large octopi/squid have proved to be popular adversaries for oceangoing heroes; in Tentacles (1977) Henry Fonda has no choice but to set some killer whales on one, and Deep Rising (1998) features a primeval beast with extra spiky tentacles which seem to be sentient beings in their own right.

17. Squirm (1976)

Squirm’s intro implies it’s based on a true story, citing an electrical storm which sent thousands of volts into the ground, cutting off a town’s electricity and leading them to experience “one of the most bizarre freaks of nature ever recorded”.

Director Jeff Lieberman insists “Squirm is based on a scientific reality. Electricity really does make worms shoot out of the ground.” I’m guessing it doesn’t normally give them little fangs and a whining shriek, though. Squirm takes a while to get going, but the climactic scenes of piles of writhing worms falling out of doorways, seething across the floor and creating a deadly sea for victims to fall into makes it worth a watch. (My favourite part is actually a moment of human-on-human violence: a surprise bite to the thigh.) Fans may also enjoy Attack Of The Giant Leeches (1959 AND 2008) and Mongolian Death Worm (2010).

16. Frogs (1972)

Deceptively named, Frogs does feature a number of amphibians, but they’re more of a plague than an actual threat to life. Crabs, geckos and leeches all do their bit to ruin a family’s party weekend; the grumpy patriarch insists that “man is still master of the world” and deals with a snake by using his gun, so you know he’s going to end up with more than just frogs hopping on his picnic tea.

Which is the best moment? Is it when a woman appears to be choked simply by walking into some vines, then falls screaming into a puddle? When an actor forgets which leg is supposed to be stuck in the mud? Or perhaps the unforgettable alligator-wrestling? Special mention must go to the scene in which a survivor of the carnage hallucinates animal sounds as he surveys his collection of taxidermied creatures; all very poignant until a stuffed fish makes a noise like a cheerful dolphin.

15. The Swarm (1978)

Described as “the ultimate B movie” (presumably not as a pun), even a starry cast can’t save a film featuring frequent hallucinations of giant insects, or lines like “I never dreamed it would be the bees – they’ve always been our friend.”

Michael Caine is the expert trying to warn the military about the dangerous swarm headed their way, and being ignored just makes him even more frothing-at-the-mouth angry. The town’s flower festival is interrupted with shrieks of “The killer bees are coming!” and it seems that smashing windows in order to shelter in buildings may not be the best idea…

Various methods of defence are used, including a vaccine which a very unscientific scientist decides to try on himself, and pesticides which are no use on super smart bees: “They’re not touching the pellets – they seem to sense it’s something that could kill them!”

14. Kingdom Of The Spiders (1977)

When it comes to cheesy spider movies, we have an embarrassment of riches. Special mention must go to The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), where alien spiders resembling large cuddly toys pop out of drawers and wrestle people to the ground, and the wildly entertaining Lavalantula (2015) in which Los Angeles is invaded by giant lava-breathing spiders. 1955’s Tarantula is also worth checking out for a 100-foot monster (the UK’s spider season seems quite reasonable in comparison).

Here we have another 'interfering with nature always causes disaster' movie of the 1970s, starring a suitably dramatic William Shatner. When spiders’ usual food is in short supply due to pesticides, they band together to kill larger prey... Spare a thought for actors who were covered with real spiders for scenes (extra difficult when attempting to portray motionless dead people) and suffered itchiness from all the tiny tarantula hairs that were shed.

13. Deadly Eyes (1982)

Steroid-filled grain makes for over-sized rodents (this film had me from “dachshunds were dressed up as rats for the special effects”) and they’re soon invading homes, cinemas, and subway tunnels, determined to clamp their gnashers into human flesh.

The constant squeaking is quite disturbing, as is an early death scene (apparently filmmakers in the 70s thought of small children as fair game for grisly, albeit implied, deaths). However, it is a fun film, not least because those iron-jawed creatures vaguely resemble Roland Rat from 1980s kids’ TV.

Of Unknown Origin (1983) is perhaps the best man vs rat film, but the critters also feature in enjoyably terrible films such as Rodentz (2001) and Rats: Night Of Terror (1984). For vintage fun, try 1959’s The Killer Shrews, the first horror film to really make use of them needing to eat three times their body weight every day…

12. Anaconda (1997)

A pre-big time Jennifer Lopez stars as a documentary maker on her first big project, seeking a remote tribe who live near the Amazon river. Ice Cube, Owen Wilson and Eric Stolz are among the crew accompanying her, but Jon Voight steals the show as a sinister snake hunter.

The movie is packed with scares before any people meet the infamous anaconda (a particularly surprised panther is an early victim) but as more things go wrong they’re forced to rely on Voight’s apparently superior knowledge of the area and its wildlife. “Anacondas are the perfect killing machines,” he says gleefully. The film has many great moments, but an unexpected wink cements it as B-movie gold.

Followed by zillions of sequels including the crossover Lake Placid Vs. Anaconda (2015); serpent aficionados may also enjoy Jennifer (1978) which is basically Carrie with a twist: a teen with mystical power over snakes.

11. Black Sheep (2006)

Refreshingly fast-moving and concise, this New Zealand offering is a deliberately silly gorefest. Like all good animal-monster heroes, Henry (Nathan Meister) has a phobia about the animal in question. He returns to his family’s farm to discover that sheep are the subject of experiments which have turned them into vicious freaks. They now have the ability to eat humans, or worse, turn them into were-sheep. At least Henry now has a reason for his crippling fear, but can he overcome it and save the day?

Bring your strongest stomach and most puerile sense of humour to a movie which features sheep hijacking cars, people who resort to beating away the slavering killers with their own severed limbs, and mint sauce being used as a deadly weapon. There’s also a nice nod to the classic transformation scene in An American Werewolf In London (1981).

10. Night Of The Lepus (1972)

Rabbits may not be the first animal you’d associate with horror films, but their infamous speed at reproducing makes them a suitable candidate for this amusingly low-budget effort. After all, the film points out that their real-life population growth has wreaked havoc in their non-native countries. What happens if an accidental mix of chemicals turns those bunnies into gigantic carnivores? Based on sci-fi novel The Year Of The Angry Rabbit (1964), I was disappointed that the director failed to capitalise on the effect that car headlights might have on rabbits, when using them in the big climax.

Having seen the rabbit episode of Father Ted made it even harder to take the film seriously, but the growls and squeaks, the blood thrown upon actors with no thought to creating visible wounds, and the occasional shot of giant rabbits roaming through a miniature village, all made for a unique viewing experience.

9. Grizzly (1976)

Grizzly was originally considered a land-locked tribute to Jaws; in retrospect the tale of a psychopathic bear has more in common with the slasher films of the era. You can’t help wondering if Freddy, Jason et al were inspired by the heavy breathing and preference for nubile young women as the bear stalks happy campers showering in waterfalls.

One character occasionally dresses up in a bear skin, and it struck me that if he was periodically believing himself to be a bear and eating people, it would have been a much more interesting film. That’s not to say it doesn’t have moments of genius; I particularly like the way the bear severs limbs with one swipe of the paw and manages to keep up a steady roar while killing. (Biting isn’t always necessary – sometimes you can just squeeze people to death or swing them against tree trunks.)

8. Food Of The Gods (1976)

Vaguely inspired by an H. G. Wells novel, this covers man’s greed as well as the foolishness of feeding animals with unknown chemicals. (How very topical.) Island-dwelling farm animals fed with a mysterious substance bubbling up from the ground consequently grow abnormally large. People visiting from the mainland are attacked by a plethora of humungous chickens, wasps, and rats, which is as brilliant as it sounds. (For more of the same, 1961’s Mysterious Island also features giant crabs, birds, and insects.)

The rat scenes are particularly enjoyable, with cute rodents being filmed wandering harmlessly over miniature cars and caravans, intercut with close-ups of puppets biting people. (Just imagine a sinister version of Hammy the Hamster.)

Followed by an equally amusing sequel (Gnaw: Food Of The Gods II) in 1989, with giant children as well as animals: highlights include rats entering a pool via sewers to create carnage among synchronised swimmers.

7. Piranha 3D (2010)

Based on the original 1978 film, this was followed by a sequel, the 'wittily' titled Piranha 3DD (2012). Unashamedly a boobsploitation movie, Piranha 3D is ridiculous and knows it, but if you enjoy juvenile humour, gory deaths and extensive scenes of Kelly Brook swimming around in skimpy attire, it will certainly make a divertingly fun Friday night popcorn movie.

Richard Dreyfuss makes a cheeky cameo; Christopher Lloyd also appears as a wild-eyed scientist trying to understand this unknown species. Elizabeth Shue is the local sheriff and Jerry O’Connell has the absolute time of his life playing a sleazy photographer. The flying, snapping fish are perfect for 3D (and really, what’s the point in making a 3D film if you’re not going to have someone thrusting an outboard motor towards the audience at some point?)

Fans may also enjoy 2012’s Piranhaconda. (You’ll have to guess what that’s about.)

6. Devil Dog: The Hound Of Hell (1978)

Unfortunately the kids in this film didn’t get the memo about just saying no if a man asks if you want to see his puppies. It’s all a bit Village Of The Damned, as their new pet doesn’t maul anyone, just uses those big doggy eyes to hypnotise them all – “that damn dog tried to force me to put my hand in the lawnmower!”

The kids’ mum is curious about the dark gloopy stuff on the floor (she puts her fingers in it to sniff it, not something I would do with a dog in the house) – and it’s blood. Hey, are you kids practising the dark arts again? Soon it’s down to their dad to figure out how to defeat the devilish pooch. It’s never really clear WHY satanists want to spread the word via evil dogs, but it sure makes for an entertaining film.

5. Monkey Shines (1988)

Alan is paralysed from the neck down after an accident; his dodgy scientist pal Jeffrey provides Ella, a monkey home-help. Fittingly, George A Romero’s first studio film is all about grey matter: Jeffrey’s been injecting Ella with a serum made with human brains in the hope of increasing her intelligence. Instead it creates a telepathic link between her and Alan, and he finds himself as enraged as, well, a laboratory monkey who’s been injected with random chemicals.

Ella starts carrying out Alan’s darker temptations, resulting in hilarious scenes of her electrocuting people in baths and chasing them with razors. She also likes to turn the lights down and put on romantic music when snuggling with Alan, which should maybe have been the first sign something wasn’t quite right. For more killer simian fun check out Shakma (1990) and its amazingly dramatic trailer.

4. Snakes On A Plane (2006)

Snakes often make for great B-movies (See Sssssss (1973) and Rattled (1996)) and while this clearly has a B-movie premise, it transcends its origins to become a witty and well-structured comedy thriller.

For the uninitiated: a dude in witness protection is flying to LA to give evidence, never suspecting the criminals in question might fill the plane’s cargo hold with snakes, dosed up with pheromones to make them super-aggressive. Serpents slither from air vents, ping out of the ceiling along with oxygen masks, and pop out of sick bags. They memorably surprise a couple attempting to join the mile high club, and while the surviving passengers panic, FBI agent Samuel L Jackson takes charge with an infamous line; suffice to say he’s had enough of snakes.

Mockbuster Snakes On A Train was released direct-to-video in 2006; Tail Sting (2001) also follows a remarkably similar storyline, but with giant scorpions.

3. Alligator (1980)

Expanding on the 'baby alligator gets flushed then roams the sewers' urban legend, from the moment you see a victim’s leg being casually carried around in a plastic bag, revealing that he was wearing alligator wing tips, you know you’re watching a quality film.

Alligators can look like animatronics at the best of times so the ropey special effects are fairly effective, and it’s genuinely well-written and humorous. However, most of the deaths are so comical it falls firmly into B-movie territory. The highlight is a wedding reception crashed by the hungry gator, who sends people flying through the air at jaunty angles with his tail. He rampages through town, unseen by all the people whose sole purpose is looking for him. (The police spot him in a lake but accidentally use him as a ski jump, resulting in their boat exploding.) Followed by Alligator II: The Mutation (1991) and many pale imitations.

2. Slugs (1988)

“What kind of slug bites someone?” “The kind that’s living in your garden,” is the pithy retort in this enjoyably awful movie. Slugs has it all: an everyday creature made terrifying by unusual aggression and a population explosion, plentiful nudity for those obligatory sex scenes, and slugs infiltrating homes via lettuces etc.

But Slugs really shines in its death scenes. My favourite is the elderly man who finds a nasty surprise in his gardening glove and instinctively takes an axe to his arm just before there’s an explosion set off by – well, slugs were involved. A close second is the man whose wife mistook slugs for anchovies… let’s hope nothing happens at his fancy business lunch! People slip in slithering masses of slugs and are eaten despite their feeble attempts to simply get up again. We also learn that the secret to bad acting is to speak incredibly slowly.

1. Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)

This tops the list because it works on so many levels. It has hysterical munching sounds and a creature who grows bigger every time she eats another rooftop sunbather or window cleaner, magicked into life by bizarre religious rituals involving a man dressed like a giant bird.

Despite its impeccable B-movie credentials, it’s actually well-structured, with an interesting, original plotline and stunning aerial shots of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Writer/Director/Producer Larry Cohen claims he was “aided by the fact I didn’t have any money”, depending on tantalising glimpses of Q rather than full-on special effects all the way through. David Carradine is the cop on the case of the inexplicable deaths – “maybe his head just got loose and fell off” – and has a hard time convincing his superiors that a mythical winged lizard is responsible. It’s a rip-roaring monster movie that culminates in a big shoot out at the Chrysler Building.

Honourable mentions

Bug (1975): Mutant cockroaches who live on raw meat and terrorise small towns by setting stuff on fire. There is nothing I can say that would add to the brilliance of this concept.

Beaks: The Movie (1986): A low budget version of The Birds, its saving grace is that it’s better than Birdemic: Shock And Terror (2008) which has the kind of 'clip-art from the 90s' special effects that must be seen to be believed.

Zombeavers (2014): It’s about zombie beavers and pretty much does what it says on the tin. (Tagline: They’ll dam you to hell!) I’m only surprised this idea wasn’t used earlier – they can swim AND gnaw through doors. This stuff writes itself.

Mosquito (1994):“Something is killing these people and sucking them dry!” Regular mozzies are annoying enough, but gigantic alien ones can only be dealt with by fiery explosions.

Day Of The Animals (1977): A very serious Leslie Nielsen heads up a group of hikers attacked by animals. It isn’t an amazing film (not counting a plate of rats springing into someone’s face) but it has some awesome lines “My god, they’re like an army!” and famous last words – “ALL animals are afraid of fire!”

There may only be one Captain Jack Sparrow, savvy… but that could change. Indeed, while it was only a matter of months ago that Disney began floating production ideas for a sixth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie starring Johnny Depp in his signature role of Jack Sparrow, now comes news out of Deadline that Disney has met with writers Rheet Reese and Paul Wernick about doing a potential reboot.

This is a surprise, because while it appears too early to suggest they would recast Depp (or simply not include Jack Sparrow in a reboot), the writing on the wall is that they’re at least strongly considering it. It should be noted that last movie wasn't that warmly received, and was the lowest grossing Pirates movie since the 2003 original. While it still made a mint, the previous 2011 film made $1.07 billion worldwide, also on mixed reviews. This coupled with Depp’s rising price tag and diminished popularity would make it conceivable Disney would look at its options for one of its most profitable franchises, especially from the likes of Reese and Wernick who are the writers of the even more irreverent and box office-friendly Deadpool franchise (they also wrote the original Zombieland and its upcoming sequel).

Nevertheless, this is a bit of a surprise, and not just because Salazar's Revenge ended with a setup for Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann and Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner to return for a major role. More importantly, the entire franchise was built around Depp’s unusual but rather brilliant character actor creation, one that some Disney executives in 2002 and ’03 were livid about, complaining that he was ruining their swashbuckling movie.

Now it seems the franchise Depp essentially made might outlive him (or his career), because Disney has a brand in need of polishing. Whether audiences want to sail those waters without a familiar captain though is a still an open, and intriguing, question.

It's also worth remembering that we suggested this very idea a few months ago. You're welcome Disney.