Better Call Saul; Resident Evil; Night Coppers

“Towards the end, there is a particularly virtuoso camera sequence involving a deep-focus shot through room after room seen from Saul’s perspective, which makes the space open up like the doors of Bluebeard’s castle, or a 17th-century Dutch painting of a domestic interior, with the ingenious twist that the shot is then reversed so you get the henchman’s view of Saul.This Vince Gilligan-directed episode loves such symmetries and reversals, most tellingly one involving guns.”
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian 

“Only later do we learn what this portends – and that under the quirkiness lurks an abyss of tragedy. The same could be said for Better Call Saul itself, which, beneath its wacky polyester suits and zany camera angles, has completed its transformation into one of the most riveting – and bleakest –  dramas of the streaming age.”
Ed Power, Telegraph 

“As a piece of tightly-wound genre television, “Point and Shoot” is nothing short of exemplary. Even when the stakes are life and death, and the soundtrack has crescendoed into a sustained, high-octane throb, there’s still a one-of-a-kind patience to Better Call Saul’s pacing, from the methodical way shots are stitched together to the confident, dialogue-free stretches of heightened tension.”
Louis Chilton, The Independent 

“There were a couple of episodes in the earlier run where it felt as if the plot meandered (possibly to do with Odenkirk’s on-set heart attack?), yet longueurs are always rescued by moments of high drama, which the phenomenal mid-season finale left us with.”
James Jackson,The Times 

“A Resident Evil adaptation is only as good as its ravenous swarm – look like a flash mob of A-level drama students, until they start running, at which point the frenetic action sequences are lit more sparingly than a medieval boudoir.Perhaps the makers of this show felt that escaping the video game aesthetic was enough. And for some it will be: in the Wesker origin story and the skull-crunching violence, there’s something to appeal to devotees of the landmark franchise. But for those unfamiliar with the fabled video game series, this will feel like little more than a muddled, and somewhat tacky, zombie serial, saddled with the baggage of pre-existing lore. The video games were a monster hit, but there’s not enough meat on the bones of this rework for anyone but hardcore completists.”
Nick Hilton, The Independent 

“The production values for Racoon City, for instance, are more Hollyoaks than HBO. And yet the CGI zombies are wonderfully abominable and the pace cranks up a gear whenever they lumber into view. Low-key political commentary has meanwhile been smuggled into sequences in which the citizens of a crumbling UK try to flee across the Channel to the promised land of Calais. Don’t worry – you can ignore that. Resident Evil is a zombie caper that knows what it’s here for. And that is to fill the screen with rampaging hordes of undead and to reassure horror fans that there is life after The Walking Dead.”
Ed Power, The Telegraph 

”Some adrenaline charged call-outs mirrored scenes in The Responder, Martin Freeman’s BBC1 drama about a patrolling copper on night duty.” Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail