Beginner's Guide to Doctor Who on Big Finish - Part 1: Streaming

Doctor Who is my favourite show. Hell, that’s probably not selling it enough: It is my favourite media franchise, across all forms it has taken over the past 60+ years.

At time of writing, the show has aired 884 individual episodes, encompassing 312 complete stories. But that represents just a fraction of what is available out there. There’s the numerous comic strips and series, there’s novelisations of the televised episodes that often went into much more detail and even redeemed some of the weaker stories, there’s original novelised adventures that kept the franchise alive during the wilderness years of the ‘90s… and then there’s the audio dramas, in particular the ones made by Big Finish Productions. Doctor Who on TV has just under 900 episodes. Doctor Who on Big Finish is at over two thousand and counting.

Being The Ricardos (2021) - Movie Review

A little over a year after his previous feature, and Aaron Sorkin is already back at it with another directorial effort. Only this one is sticking much closer to his own background in television than his last two films, with a biopic on one of the greatest sitcom couples in American history in Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I once again find myself needing to admit my lack of background knowledge, as I haven’t seen much from any of Lucille’s shows (save for that one conveyor belt gag, which is still one of the greatest sitcoms moments ever in my book), but then again, I didn’t know all that much about Steve Jobs, Molly Bloom, or Abbie Hoffman, and that didn’t stop me from liking Sorkin’s depictions of those people. But while this has Sorkin still doing what he does best, the effect is significantly dampened this time around.

Bliss (2021) - Movie Review

In the right hands, cinema can be a highly effective psychological tool. It can provide a window into not necessarily objective reality, but reality as interpreted by a specific person’s perspective. This is why a lot of dream narrative films by David Lynch and even Ari Aster can trip some audiences up, because what they offer isn’t the real world but a delusion of it, where everyone is in actuality just a manifestation of a certain facet of one character’s psyche. It’s one of the main reasons why I love psychological thrillers, or really just psychological art in general… and it’s also one of the reasons why this particular feature so phenomenally let me down.

Cinderella (2021) - Movie Review

After knocking it out of the park with her directorial debut in Blockers, I’ll admit to being excited for what Kay Cannon had planned next. But at the same time I was waiting for news of that film’s release, I was also hearing some less-than-glowing reactions to an adaptation of Cinderella that Amazon Studios had put together. Then I suddenly realised that these two films were indeed one and the same and… well, I was still hoping for something good, but that expectation has significantly dampened.