The show’s format has morphed several times over the years. Season 4 is basically a 7-hour movie: a completely serialised eight-episode story. Here’s the biggest difference, however: where the film was unashamedly fan-servicey, season 4 is about giving the audience what they need, not what they want.

I think people who only ever dipped their toe in the show missed out just how broken Veronica (Kristen Bell) is. That was always my favourite part of the show: the darkness hiding behind her bubbly persona. And it’s just as well, because this season really dives into that aspect of her personality. Here is someone who was raped, and her best friend killed, all before her 17th birthday. She’s been clenching her fists ever since, and it’s definitely taking its toll. Like all noir protagonists, Veronica continues to be the instrument of her own demise – don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

The most enjoyable part of this season? Watching Veronica and her dad work together as equals. She may have gained her PI licence towards the end of s3, but this is the first time we really see them working side by side as co-workers, spit balling ideas and challenging each other’s theories. The most surprising part of this season? Seeing a different, more mature Logan (Jason Dohring) who, miraculously, doesn’t feel neutered. I never thought a post-therapy Logan would be an effective character, but Rob Thomas, Diane Ruggiero-Wright and others have shown me just how good they are at writing characters that truly evolve.

There are a lot of returning faces, but unlike the movie, it never feels like overload – people show up in places that make sense. Poor old Wallace (Percy Daggs III) is again only peripherally relevant, and my one wish is that he gets a more prominent role if we get another season. The guy’s been on the sidelines since s3.

The mystery concerns a bombing in Neptune during spring break. As usual, the story is full of twists and turns, and the list of suspects is long. J.K. Simmons, Patton Oswald and Clifton Collins Jnr are the big-name additions to the cast, and both are predictably excellent. Mido Hamada plays a congressman embroiled in the mystery, and his character is the only misstep. Throughout the season, his actions make little sense, and his motivations flip-flop depending on the needs of the script.

My only other complaint is far from integral. Visually speaking, this looks nothing like the first three seasons or the film. This show always had a California-noir thing going on, with lots of exaggerated colours – neon lights, stained glass windows – that served to exaggerate the shadows lurking in the corners of Neptune. This season, however, offers nothing but flat and bland lighting. It’s weird considering TV these days is just as stylish as feature films – if anything, the visuals are less impressive than the previous incarnations.

There’s been a subtle shift here too. As you’d expect, Veronica and Logan’s relationship is different to the early years. The writing is less soap and more kitchen sink (at least in the first half of the season) and there are a several arguments between them that play out quite realistically. As someone who seems to have come through the other side of trauma, Logan is the only one who really understands how broken Veronica is, and like I said before, her flaws have never been focussed on this much before.

As a character study, this season offers some of the best writing the show has ever seen. The central mystery won’t have the watercooler edge that s1 did, but the drama will definitely remembered by fans for years to come. If you’re someone who lost interest some time in s3 or perhaps when the movie came out, I can assure you that this is a much more confident run of episodes. We fans are in an incredibly lucky position – we love the show as much as the central cast do, and Kristen Bell has said time and again that she’s prepared to return to this character for as long as she’s on this earth. Not only that, but creator Rob Thomas has shown he’s adaptable to whatever format is going (serialised network TV, case-of-the-week TV, feature film, books and now streaming TV). Long may Veronica continue.

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Richard K. Morgan’s book was first published in 2002, and the film rights were quickly sold for $1 million. It’s taken over 15 years for it to reach the screen, but for fans it’s surely been worth the wait. For those who don’t know, it’s a kind of cyberpunk detective novel. In the far-flung future, the richest of the rich can transfer their consciousness from one body to another. This is called re-sleeving. This means they are effectively immortal, and appropriately earns them the moniker of Methuselahs. When one of these Methuselah’s sleeves is ‘murdered’, he engages the help of an ex-convict, Takeshi Kovacs, to solve the mystery of his death.

It’s impossible to ignore the fact that Altered Carbon borrows heavily from the likes of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. It’s not a particularly unique story, but the production values do make it stand out from other science fiction TV series, even in this current Golden Age.

Joel Kinnaman plays Kovacs, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say he’s rather wooden. There are very few actors that can brilliantly execute the downbeat, taciturn gumshoe, and he ain’t one of them. Serviceable is probably the best word for the performance.

Thankfully, his co-star, Martha Higareda, more than makes up for Kovacs’ blandness. Her police detective, Kristin Ortega, is the best part about this shoe, and her no-nonsense yet heartfelt delivery should mean she gets her own movie or series, stat. (In fact, she gets my vote if they ever adapt the “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter” novels.) There are a tonne of supporting actors that excel in smaller roles too, including Ato Essando as a grieving ex-marine and Chris Conner as an AI self-styled after Edgar Allan Poe.

But the main problem I have with Altered Carbon is more thematic. First off, we have this great premise, with people being able to change their appearance by re-sleeving. The potential stories are legion, surely! So what do we get? Sex workers. All this storytelling potential, and our lead characters spends most of his time in strip clubs and/or brothels.

But it doesn’t stop there. What this story really needs is dead sex workers. Female dead sex workers, naturally, because if Blade Runner 2049 taught us anything, it’s that future noir is just as obsessed with dead naked women as old-fashioned noir. The number of naked women who get either ogled, beaten, raped or killed – or any combination of the above – is quite excessive for a story that could have taken its premise literally anywhere, but instead stuck with the tropes that have dogged the genre for decades.

There a lot of almost-literal white-washing going on too. Frequently. It’s like they saw a certain remake released last year and said, “Hold my drink.” What makes it worse is that Will Yun Lee, who plays the original Kovacs, gives a much more nuanced performance. He should have been the star of this show.

Apologies for the rant. I can only assume that the problems I have with Altered Carbon were also present in the source material. In my old age, I’m clearly getting fed up with science fiction – a genre that offers so many possibilities – refusing to get really creative, and instead falling back on bad habits. If you’re fresh to the science fiction noir subgenre, perhaps these things won’t bother you. I just wish Altered Carbon had some ideas to match the stunning production values and fantastic performances.

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Fast forward to 2017 and the $150 million sequel is struggling in the box office. It was aiming for a $50 million opening weekend and only clawed back $31 million. It’s almost like they didn’t realise Blade Runner was always a niche film. Hugely influential, yes, but never cinema for the masses.

This film is set 30 years after the original, and features a new Blade Runner in the process of retiring replicants. The fact that this particular agent, K (Ryan Gosling), is a newer model of replicant himself, adds an extra layer of complexity to his job.

Denis Villeneuve’s film honours the original about as much as you’d hope. This is a director who’s yet to helm a bad production, and it’s incredible to think he handles such a daunting task with aplomb. The pace is just as sluggish as the 1982 film (seriously, whenever I rewatch the original, I oscillate between finding it entrancing and being more than a little bored), whilst the visuals are different yet complementary. There’s Villeneuve’s usual sense of impending dread, and his direction is fantastic.

Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score references Vangelis’ classic work in a cursory sense, particularly at the start and at the very end, but most of the time we’re safely ensconced in the regular Zimmer sound, with pounding drums and droning synths. It’s a pity Jóhann Jóhannsson left the project, because I’m interested to see what his score would have been like.

The acting is very, very good, and Gosling does an exemplary job of being just as taciturn as Deckard in the original. Sylvia Hoeks, Mackenzie Davis and Robin Wright are all excellent, and we should all stop being surprised each time we learn that Dave Bautista is a really, really good actor. Of course, Harrison Ford is present, not to mention a couple of other actors from the original. The story goes in some interesting directions too, and successfully extrapolates from the-created-confronts-their-creators vibe that Ridley explored in the original (and in his Alien prequels, to be honest.)

Here’s the thing though: Blade Runner 2049 is pretty darn sexist. All the female characters fall into the innocent/fallen woman category, and they’re usually at the receiving end of horrific violence and/or naked. I appreciate that this is noir, which loves the whole Madonna/whore dichotomy, but the likes of “Veronica Mars” and “Jessica Jones” have shown us that feminist noir is entirely possible. And to be honest, the original didn’t feel this sexist, even if you could argue that Deckard always was.

The other big problem is the runtime. At 164 minutes, it’s a really hard slog. The final act could have had a good chunk taken out of it without losing anything important. Also, I’m no hater of Jared Leto, but his few scenes are extraneous, and slow the film down even more.

At the end of the day, this is nowhere near as bad as it could have been. I have no doubt that if Ridley Scott himself had been behind the camera, rather than simply producing, it would have been much worse. And one can’t deny that Villeneuve is a master of his craft. It’s just such a pity the screenplay fails in a couple of significant areas. It’s a worthy sequel – and a feast for the eyes – yet nowhere near the masterpiece that some critics have proclaimed.

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To a certain extent, this is more of the same. Desolate setting, dodgy laid-back country folk who speak in single syllables, if at all. And of course, bubbling underneath everything is a steady current of racism. And front and centre is Jay, as the obstinate detective, never swaying from his task.

One thing has changed, however: if, like me, you found the confusing narrative of Mystery Road frustrating, Goldstone swings the other way, with a story that’s laid out from the get-go. In fact, I’d say writer/director/composer Sen went too far: the story is sparse, with no surprises. The prequel was a little bit too much like The Big Sleep for me, a film that left my confused come the end credits. Goldstone, on the other hand, is positively pedestrian.

Technically speaking, Goldstone is a towering achievement. It looks stunning, it sounds stunning. There are a number of birds-eye view shots of vehicles powering along the deserted highway – presumably with the aid of a drone camera – and they perfectly capture the bleak umber of the Australian outback. Sen’s score relies on a single piece of music that’s played half a dozen times, but it’s a tune heavy with tragedy, and perfectly accompanies the downbeat narrative.

This film is frustrating, because it falls just short of great for me. It may have addressed some of the issues that bugged me with Mystery Road, but it’s brought with it new problems. The story is too simplistic, and the nature of the crime Jay’s trying to solve is basically a repeat of the first film. I love that these films exist, but they’re still not as impressive as they should be.

The good news is that there’s further reference to those mysterious ‘super-dogs’ that were mentioned and never elucidated in the first film. Either it’s an ongoing metaphor or we’ll finally get an explanation in the next sequel.

More of this, please, but I’m still waiting for the ‘perfect’ Jay Swan movie…

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Starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling as an odd couple of private detectives, the film sees them embroiled in a mystery involving porn, catalytic converters and kids too smart for their own good. Set in the late 70s, the film positively revels in an exaggerated version of the era – so much smog, so much hair – and the Los Angeles setting means that it gets to mimic all the detective fiction of which Black’s always been such a fan.

Jackson Healy (Crowe) and Holland March (Gosling) are hilarious to watch, and their pairing really does nail that buddy cop vibe that every studio was grasping for in the mid to late-80s. Angourie Rice (from These Final Hours) is the third (unofficial) member of the team, Holly, and she’s fantastic in a role that we’ve seen before, but nevertheless provides a perfect counterbalance for Jackson and Holland.

As an action comedy, this film hits a home run. The comedy is broad, and this is certainly more multiplex-friendly than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, however, so those who hold that earlier Black film in high regard might be left feeling a bit unfulfilled.

And the thing is, at the end of the day, this film isn’t anything special. From a screenwriting standpoint, it’s excellent. No one gets structure and dialogue like Black, and the pacing is spot on. As we’ve seen with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3, he knows how to deconstruct the traditional masculine lead, and he does it here with gleeful abandon. So the guy knows how to write complex male characters.

When it comes to female characters in The Nice Guy however, Black is less successful. Put bluntly, all of the females depicted here fall into one of two camps – innocents or fallen women – and it’s disappointing to see that he can’t write a female character with more nuance. I’d like to see the fantastic shades of grey he used to paint Jackson and Holland applied to some female roles. I don’t mean to take anything away from Holly (or Rice’s brilliant performance), it’s just that we’ve seen this type of character over and over.

The Nice Guys is good fun. For anyone who’s misses a good bit of noir, this detective film will be right down their alley. Whilst Black is still an excellent screenwriter, I don’t believe he’s truly stretching himself here.

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The film is billed as an erotic thriller, but to be honest all the erotic stuff is over in the first five minutes. As the film opens, Julien Gahyde (Amalric) is having an affair with Esther Despierre (co-writer Stéphanie Cléau) in a first floor apartment. He has to rush out of the room when Esther’s husband approaches from the street below, and returns home to his wife and daughter. But that’s all in the past. In the present, Julien is answering questions from the police, the prison psychologist and the magistrate, and we quickly realise that Julien has become embroiled in a murder investigation.

The Blue Room oozes noir. It isn’t quite as heavy on the shadows – in fact it’s often brightly lit – but the framing itself is reminiscent of simpler cinematic times. The film is presented in a 4:3 aspect ratio also, which evokes films of yesteryear. Finally, there’s Grégor Hetzel’s score, which is deliberately old school, completely eschewing subtlety.

The pacing and editing of The Blue Room is exceptional. At a mere 76 minutes, the time flies by, yet it’s a densely-packed film. There are a number of montages, often combining past and present – one dealt with via voice over, the other presented in images – which results in supremely efficient storytelling.

And for the most part, I loved it. Alas, some significant ambiguities remain by the time the credits roll, and whilst I have no problem with that in principle, in this case it left me frustrated. Noir is such a plot-heavy genre that, without clear-cut answers, it can easily lead to disappointment. I know it can work – the director’s cut of Blade Runner proved that – but here it just feels…cheap.

It’s a pity because a film like this should have broad appeal. It’s nowhere near as arty as the marketing – or indeed the first ten minutes – suggest; this is a punchy thriller touching on universal themes. Almaric and Cléau are good in their respective roles, but they’re required to be elusive in their motives, so it’s difficult to pick a side. Instead, I was left watching the tale unravel, admittedly on the edge of my seat, until the lights came up and I felt strangely unsatisfied.

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Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, and opportunistic yet enterprising young man who stumbles upon the lucrative trade of ‘nightcrawling’. This means he lurks around the streets of Los Angeles in the dead of night, glued to his police scanner. The moment a crime gets reported, he’s there with a video camera, getting some gruesome footage for the morning news. After his initial attempts lead to success, Lou sets out to raise the stakes, pushing himself further and further in an attempt to get that ‘perfect’ piece of footage.

I have no idea just how close to reality Nightcrawler veers, but with a bit of a mental squint, the world it describes doesn’t seem that different to our own. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched live television, but the stories peddled by commercial news networks aren’t that far removed from what we see in the film. It’s all about constructing a narrative, and if that occasionally requires manipulating events, then so be it. It’s all in the name of entertainment, right?

Lou is a mesmerising character. He’s creepy, borderline sociopathic in his detachment, yet there’s something charismatic about him too. I wasn’t repulsed; I wanted to see what he’d do next. Rene Russo’s TV news director, Nina Romina, is equally interesting. She and Lou take turns pushing the envelope, and together they create something horrid.

You know when you’re out in the small hours of the morning, it’s dead quiet and your normal suburban streets seem like an alien world? That’s the kind of world Nightcrawler explores. It’s a fascinating look at the familiar turned mysterious and the mundane turned horrifying (and I’m sure it made it shooting the film cheaper too).

The cinematography is crisp and clean, and all the night time driving scenes in Lou’s sports car put me in mind of Drive, which featured a similarly detached leading man. The disc has a smattering of interviews and featurettes. They’re tightly edited, so no one waffles on, however the interviewer is off mic the entire time, which is frustrating.

If there would be any complaint about Nightcrawler, it would be that nothing ever phases Lou. The same thing frustrated me a lot more in Thank You For Smoking – a forever dauntless protagonist is less interesting than one who questions himself. The last ten minutes didn’t feel quite right either, suggesting perhaps some reshoots or last minute alterations to the script.

That being said, Nightcrawler is every bit as good as audiences said back when it was on the big screen. A fascinating tale of obsession, it’s a film that really gets under your skin.

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Primarily based on the second ‘Sin City’ collection, this film ties in closely with the first film. It’s taken nine years for the sequel to make it to the big screen, but A Dame to Kill For does a good job of reminding us of the salient plot points from the first movie. Trying to work out the chronology of events causes a bit of a headache, but that was also the case with the comics, if I remember correctly.

Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jaime King and Powers Boothe return, and we have a whole new host of stars to add to the list. Eva Green and Josh Brolin are at the forefront, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Dennis Haysbert (replacing Michael Clarke Duncan) have significant roles also.

If you’re a fan of the first film, or indeed of the comics, I’m not sure how you could find fault with A Dame to Kill For. It feels like more Sin City, basically. Even better, it comes in at a nifty 100 minutes or so, which means it isn’t so much of a marathon. The pacing is much better too.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Sin City, but the visual effects are pretty much the same. Sure, there are sequences that are a lot more complex, but Rodriguez is a pro at making these kinds of greenscreen movies, and when the end result is so impressive to look at, it’s hard to complain.

If the role of a sequel is to transcend the original, however, then this film definitely doesn’t do that. It’s the same booze, broads and bullets (heh…they should make that the name one of the collections!) as we saw the first time around. It’s the same expressionism meets noir, ultra-sleazy, ultra-macho stuff that Miller excels at, and the thing is, we’ve all seen femme fatales before, it’s just that here he tries to make the ultimate femme fatale.

Basically, it’s as above, so below. But maybe audience  – and my – expectations have shifted somewhat in the interim.

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Set nine years after season 3, the film begins with Veronica declaring that she’s left her sleuthing days behind her. With psychology and law degrees under her belt, she’s being interviewed by one of the most prestigious law firms in New York when she learns of a murder in her home town of Neptune. Drawn inexorably back to where all her troubles began – and ended – she’s soon neck deep in another mystery, with a huge cast of familiar faces around her.

It is really quite astounding how many recognisable characters were rounded up for the film. I even had trouble remembering a couple of them them, but nevertheless it has the effect of bestowing a certificate of authenticity on the belated film. Even more surprising is the fact that only a couple of said minor characters feel shoehorned into the plot. There are also some surprises in the form of bigger name stars that I won’t spoil for you.

Of course, this is Bell’s show, and she slips back into the role as if no time has passed whatsoever. Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) is the second-most important character in the Veronica Mars world, so it comes as little surprise that he’s entangled in the primary plot. Dohring was always the TV show’s secret weapon – in the early days of season 1, we had no idea just how fantastic a performance he was capable of, nor how significant his role would become – but here he feels somehow muted. In part, it’s the same problem that Buffy and Angel had: when the two characters aren’t at loggerheads, they’re less interesting. This would be my main complaint with the movie – Logan doesn’t get much of a character arc. But I guess that’s fair enough when you only have 107 minutes to tell a story and have to spend quite a bit of that time getting everyone up to speed.

The script is as sharp as ever, and all the feminist, postmodernist, Raymond-Chandler-meets-Nancy-Drew elements are present and correct. In fact, the film is much better than the worst parts of season 3, which suffered because its future was so uncertain (having to wrap up plots early, then being told they were renewed for another three episodes, and so on.)

It must be said that this doesn’t really feel like a big budget feature film. It’s more of a TV movie. That’s not to say it looks cheap – indeed, the show never did look cheap to begin with – more that it doesn’t broaden its scope, even though it’s getting a cinema release in a few countries. Interestingly, the presence of a murder mystery such as this further highlights the fact that thrillers really aren’t too popular in contemporary Hollywood, instead placing all their bets on mega-budget tent pole blockbusters.

At the end of the day, fans of the TV show won’t be disappointed. For those who never really got what all the fuss was about, this won’t change your mind. For people like me, however, more Veronica Mars is a blessing. After ‘Arrested Development’ and now this, we only need more ‘Firefly’ and we’ll have the holy trinity of overdue geek TV resurrections.

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Ryan Gosling plays a movie stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver whose insistence on laying out clear and concise parameters around his involvement means he is one of the best in his class. He is never named, known only as ‘Driver’, and has only limited social contact with his boss (Bryan Cranston as Shannon). When he meets his new neighbours Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio, however, he will be drawn into a criminal conspiracy that will force him to break all his rules to ensure his new friends’ safety.

There is little new in the premise of Drive, with the loner gun-for-hire an archetype of long standing, and the disaster of deciding to abandon his own instincts a similarly commonplace plot device. What is remarkable about Drive, however, is the assurance with which Refn and his cast deal with the material. The film features a wonderful opening sequence that defines the lead character and his world with effortless grace, and then follows that bravura entrée with a perfectly measured spiral into brutality and darkness.

Refn seems to know exactly how long to linger, and just when his film needs to shift gears. He is happy to spend prolonged sequences with Gosling and Mulligan sharing minimal dialogue, and yet his characters never lose their audience’s interest. Gosling is tasked with the sullen outsider role, and manages to maintain empathy despite giving so little away. His long stares and grunted responses mean he is a hard man to like, but the brief glimpses Refn allows of Driver’s heart become all the more important for their scarcity. Mulligan is almost perfectly cast in a role that easily could have seemed beyond her. She manages the natural wariness of the single mother unexpectedly well, and balances toughness with vulnerability in a performance of dexterity.

The supporting cast is superb, with Albert Brooks, Cranston and Ron Perlman all absolutely nailing their roles. Brooks is particularly memorable, playing against type so confidently it might shock many who know him mostly for his more recent roles in fairly average comedies like The In-Laws. Perlman is at least on familiar ground, but certainly seems to be enjoying himself. Unfortunately, Christina Hendricks is given very little to do in a role that seems hardly worthy of her skills.

Drive is a bleak and violent excursion into the Los Angeles underbelly – a description that could apply to many of the modern noir genre – yet it stands above most of its peers due to deft timing and memorable performances. Refn’s film knows just when to accelerate and when to cruise, and he has coaxed brilliance from Gosling and Mulligan that alone is worth the admission price. That he wraps it all so tightly into a package of only 100 minutes length is the final virtue. Highly recommended.

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