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Michael Fassbender and David Fincher teaming up makes perfect sense. The duo work together so well in their new movie “The Killer” that it’s a wonder that they haven’t collaborated before. Netflix is releasing it theatrically on Oct. 27 and it will start streaming on Nov. 10.

In the new thriller, Fassbender plays a cold, meticulous, philosophizing hitman who must go on a mission to right his own wrong when he makes a mistake on a job. He’s also out for revenge, as is par for the course for a lot of assassin movies. But what isn’t par for the course is Fassbender’s lean and mean performance. We very rarely hear him speak in his actual scenes. Instead, we mostly hear him in a constantly-running voiceover, Fassbender utilizing his rasping voice to good effect. In his scenes, it’s Fassbender’s physicality — from impressive yoga to brutal...

Saturday marks the final day of the Cannes Film Festival, with the usual closing ceremonies and awards presentations along with the out-of-competition premiere of Pixar’s “Elemental.” Let us all hope that Disney release earns better festival notices than Lucafilm’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

“Perfect Days” makes a perfect debut.

Perfect Days. Did Wim Wenders just make his best film since Until The End Of The World? Holy crap.

— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) May 26, 2023

Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” was the hero of the day, earning strong notices and the now-standard standing ovation. TheWrap’s Nicholas Barber called it “an endearing, admiring portrait of a decent man.” The near-consensus was that Wenders had made his best narrative film in a very long time. The film has already been acquired by Neon, which has been on a shopping spree with “this film”Perfect Days, “Robot Dreams” and “Anatomy of a Fall.

Festival unveils 2022 competition juries.

The BFI London Film Festival has announced its jury line-up for this year’s event.

The official competition jury is led by The Power Of The Dog and Cold War producer Tanya Seghatchian, while the first feature competition jury, which grants the Sutherland Award, will be headed up by Queen Of Glory director and actor Nana Mensah.

Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini will lead the jury selecting the winner of the Grierson Award for best documentary after winning the award in 2018 for his film What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire.

The immersive art...

The Toronto International Film Festival, the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci)[/link] and the Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema (Netpac)[/link] have named their award winners for work screened at TIFF 2021.

“We are thrilled to announce that Anatolian Leopard has received the 2021 Fipresci Jury Award,” said Diana Sanchez, senior director, film, TIFF. “Every year we are amazed at the creativity and audaciousness of the filmmakers in our line-up. Anatolian Leopard, directed by Emre Kayiş is no exception.”

This year’s Fipresci jury members included Andrew Kendall, Esin Kücüktepepinar, Caspar Salmon, Gilbert Seah[/link], and Teresa Vena.

The 2021 Fipresci jury released a statement that called its winner “a perfectly controlled comedy of manners, Anatolian Leopard takes the temperature of a country torn between the old ways and modernity – not to say between honor and corruption – while offering up a melancholy portrait of a man at odds with his surroundings. Emre...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder. This year's Venice Film Festival has come to an end, and you can find the full list of award winners here. Following the success of Parasite, Neon will be bringing Bong Joon-ho's 2003 Memories of Murder to the big screen in the fall! Recommended VIEWINGThe official trailer for the 4K restoration of Wong Kar-wai's classic In the Mood For Love, which turns 20 this year. Ahmad Bahrani's The Wasteland, which won this year's Orizzonti Award for Best Film, follows a dozen workers in a brick factory amid its impending closing. Read Leonardo Goi's review of the film here. Another trailer from Venice: Lav Diaz's Genus Pan, which won the Orrizonti Award for Best Director. Read Michael Guarneri's review of the film here. A first look at Abel Ferrara's new documentary,...

At the end of the 1950s, celebrated French documentarian François Reichenbach, whose lens captured the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Johnny Hallyday, spent eighteen months traveling the United States, documenting its diverse regions, their inhabitants and their pastimes. The result, America As Seen by a Frenchman, is a wide-eyed perhaps even naïve journey through a multitude of different Americas, filtered through a French sensibility and serving as a fascinating exploration of a culture that is both immediately familiar and thoroughly alien.

Prison rodeos; Miss America pageants; visits to Disneyland and a school for striptease; a town inhabited solely by twins; rows of newborns in incubators, like products on an assembly line all these weird and wondrous sights, and more, are captured, sans jugement, by Reichenbach s camera, aided by whimsical narration and a jaunty musical score by the late, great Michel Legrand (Une femme est une femme).

Titled L Amérique...

The 2019 Cannes Film Festival wrapped its 72nd edition on Sunday by awarding director Bong Joon-ho with the Palme d’Or for “Parasite,” his dark comedy about a lower-class family that schemes to overtake a wealthy household. It was the first time that the Palme d’Or went to a Korean director, and many critics felt that it was the right decision: “Parasite” topped IndieWire’s annual critics survey of the best films at Cannes, with 50 critics participating from around the world.

The outcome marked the second year in a row that a Korean film topped the survey, following the first-place finish for Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” in 2018.

“Parasite” also topped the category for best screenplay. For best director, however, another Cannes favorite ranked highly. French director Celine Sciamma topped that category with “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which stars Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant as covert lovers in the 18th century.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSStanley Donen and Audrey Hepburn on the set of Funny Face (1957)We're saddened by the loss of Stanley Donen, who leaves behind a prolific catalog as filmmaker and choreographer, defined by creative partnerships with actors like Gene Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. In an obituary for The Guardian, David Thomson writes that Donen, best known for the musical Singin' In The Rain, "excelled at collaboration, which musicals, more than any other film genre, are reliant on, and which enabled him to create masterpieces." Recommended VIEWINGAmong the many commercials scattered throughout last weekend's Academy Awards ceremony was a secretive teaser for Martin Scorsese's Netflix-produced The Irishman. Mubi will be releasing David Robert Mitchell's Los Angeles-set neo-noir mystery, Under The Silver Lake, in UK cinemas (and on Mubi UK) on March 15th. A new...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSCharlie Chaplin in The Pilgrim (1923).Happy New Year! Thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, all copyrighted American works from 1923 have entered the public domain, legally allowing for re-publication and re-use. This includes Cecil B. DeMille's silent version of The Ten Commandments, and Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim.Two legends, directors Ringo Lam and Mrinal Sen, have passed away past week. Lam was a trailblazing member of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, while Mrinal Sen helped to usher in a new wave of filmmaking in India alongside Satyajit Ray. Recommended VIEWINGActor-comedian turned auteur Jordan Peele has swiftly produced his followup horror film to his unanimously celebrated Get Out. Here's the ambiguous yet stirring first trailer for Us.Janus Films have gracefully restored Jackie Chan's death defying Police Story films, in which he brilliantly stars,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSFrieze reports that David Lynch, in collaboration with Showtime and Collider games, is set to create a Twin Peaks virtual reality experience: "Twin Peaks Vr will allow players to explore locations from the original series (1990–1991) as well as Twin Peaks: The Return".We're four years removed from Gone Girl and still without a new David Fincher movie—thankfully /Film reports that, despite the radio silence, David Fincher is still set to direct "World War Z 2", which is set to shoot Summer 2019.Recommended VIEWINGClint Eastwood returns both behind and in front of the camera—this time hunted by his protégée Bradley Cooper—in what looks to be a remarkable thriller about lifetimes, borders, and family. The first trailer for The Mule is here:Here is the official trailer for Joseph Kahn's battle-rap comedy Bodied,...

It sounded too crazy to be true. The host of an opening for a Welsh marina in the 1980s was a BBC broadcaster named Michael Fish and all the invited guests were locals with fish names: Salmon, Carp, Bass, Haddock …

Charlie Lyne figured that it probably wasn’t true, but he loved the story anyway. He’d heard it from his friend Caspar Salmon, who said his grandmother had attended the event on the Welsh island of Anglesey.

“I would force him to tell it to anyone I introduced him to,” Lyne said. “It just became incessant, a favorite party trick to get him to reiterate this story — culminating in forcing him to do it for the film.”

Also Read: Finalists Announced for 2018 ShortList Film Festival

Lyne didn’t have high hopes for his short film, “Fish Story,” a finalist in TheWrap’s 2018 ShortList Film Festival that required feats of...

TheWrap is pleased to announce the 12 finalists in the seventh annual ShortList Film Festival, launching today online.

The finalists, hand-picked from the world’s top film festivals over the last year, will stream on the site starting today through August 22, 2018 — allowing visitors to vote on their favorites.

The Audience Prize and The Industry Prize winners will each receive a $5,000 cash prize during a ceremony to take place at the AMC Century City in Los Angeles on Thursday, August 23.

The films in the main competition are a mix of foreign language, drama, comedy and animation created by filmmakers from around the globe.

Also Read: Meet: The 2018 ShortList Film Festival Jurors!

In addition, eight student films from top colleges and universities included in TheWrap’s ranking of film schools have been named finalists in a sidebar competition.

The contenders come from filmmakers who studied at USC, UCLA, University of North Carolina School of the Arts,...

Now this is a unique, totally fun short documentary. Fish Story is a short doc produced by The Guardian, telling the tall tale of a event that happened years ago. The story goes that in North Wales, a weatherman named Michael Fish was the host behind an event where people with "fishy" last names (Mrs. Crab, Mr. Salmon, Mrs. Bass, Mr. Mullet) would attend a dinner and be served the fish of their last name. Filmmaker Charlie Lyne attempts to figure out if the story is actually true and reach the people who put it together. I admire the way this doc is presented, with the oral storytelling and nice, clean visuals to keep us captivated. Hit tip to The Guardian for first premiering this short film. Original description (also found on YouTube): "Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon's grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey,...

Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon’s grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey, attended exclusively by people with fish surnames. Or so he says. Thirty years later, film-maker Charlie Lyne attempts to sort myth from reality as he searches for the truth behind this fishy tale

Continue reading...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveriesNEWSJonathan Demme with Anthony Hopkins on the set of The Silence of the LambsWe are very saddened to learn that the American director Jonathan Demme has died at 73. Demme won a Best Director Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs, but that hardly summarizes or rewards the remarkable extent of his beautiful filmmaking. Just last year he released one of his very best works, the concert film Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids. Below is his 1985 music video for New Order's "The Perfect Kiss":Last year's jury for the Cannes Film Festival was lambasted as misguided after awarding the Palme d'Or not to Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann but to Ken Loach's I, Blake. The 2017 jury, headed by Pedro Almodóvar, has been announced and seems an attempt to make up for last year's kerfuffle: directors Maren Ade, Agnès Jaoui,...

Gaspar Noé, the provocative filmmaker behind Irreversible and Enter the Void, premiered his latest picture Love at the Cannes Film Festival last night - but critics haven't been totally on-board for his hardcore 3D sex odyssey.

Initial reviews have delved into the film's specifics in eye-opening details (basically, graphic sex mixed with a lot of navel gazing); however this taboo-shattering film isn't as shocking as initially expected. Read on for a round-up of reviews and reaction from social media...

The Telegraph - Robbie Collin

"The problem with Love isn't its purpose, which I find wholly laudable, nor the sex itself, which is beautiful and also - to use a taboo critical term - sexy. It's that both these things deserved a far richer and more intelligent film to support them. Catherine Breillat's Romance and Bertrand Bonello's The Pornographer both gnawed at the boundaries of taboo, but as you watched them,...

"Was there ever a series so boring as 'Zen'?" (Caspar Salmon)

Oh come on! Look at this man--he hasn't a boring bone in his body (me):

I can't say that I blame Caspar for trying to throw us off by pretending that Sewell could ever be boring, but sorry chappie, we're not going to fall for your little attempt at diversion.

It's not as if we don't have enough to watch on Sunday nights already ("Breaking Bad, True Blood, Curb Your Enthusiasm"), but the lure of Sewell starring as a detective in Rome is just too great to pass by. PBS's Masterpiece Mystery, "Zen" will play similarly to "Sherlock," with three episodes corresponding to Michael Dibdin's popular Aurelio Zen crime novels. The stories follow good cop, Zen, as he takes on criminals both within and outside his own department. Series developer, Andy Harries, speaks to "Zen...

Bacon and leers and bottles of beers, that's what dudes are made of. Amirite? Well that certainly appears to be what Michael Bay is banking on. You macho, straight dudes only like loose cars and fast women. . .or something like that. But, come on, be honest, in the in the deep recesses of your bacony hearts don't you long to turn off the explosions, the greasy babes and endless sh*tty dialoge and put on something cute for a change? A movie that smells nice, has some sweet moments, a little romance and, if you play your cards right, endless sh*tty dialogue? It's okay, you can tell us. This is a safe space. Last week some of the ladies shared which movies they loved against their will and this week it's gentlemen's choice. So here with a few of their favorite "chick flicks" are the men of Pajiba. Feel...

Hello everyone! So, there's some pretty exciting stuff to talk about today. My oh my, what programmes we've been watching on TV lately!

Pajiba Readership: Tell us! Tell us, Caspar! What programme have you seen? Should we watch it too?

Caspar: Ssshhhh. Come a little closer, my dears. Let me tell you what I watched this week.

Various Pajiba readers (to each other): Oooh, this is going to be good. I can't wait to find out what Caspar's been watching. It's going to be the new "Misfits"! Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb!

Caspar (huddling with the Pajiba readership; whispering): Ok. The programme I'll mostly be discussing this week...

Pajiba Readership: Yes?

Caspar: ...is.....

Pajiba Readership (breathlessly): Fucking tell us!

Caspar (whispering, excitedly): It's "Springwatch"!!!!!!!

Pajiba Readership (stepping back, rolling its eyes, and doing a 'black body language' hand-sign): Yo sister, say what now?

Caspar: I'm here to...

Howdy, y'all, and apols for leaving you BritishTVless for so long. But I'm back, and - well, my oh my, what a lot of stuff we have to talk about. There's the still effervescent "Psychoville", the Adam Curtis docu-lecture "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace", and the not very anticipated return of "Lead Balloon". Oh, and I'll see if I get time to throw in a dig or two at "The Shadow Line", which at first I thought was good and then later found... to be... sorry, I would finish that thought, but I just have to do the most enormous yawn right now.

One more thing before we start: many of these things are good, but the thing I am most obsessed with right now is the French Tennis Open at Roland Garros, which is French and can therefore not qualify exactly as British television. Sorry in...

Well hello my little horrorshows, and praise be to Snooki! Indeed, the gods of reality TV are smiling upon us once more as we delve into this week's televisual delights, and ah, after all the flim-flam we finally found a fine flurry of fare to fawn over. So, as my fiancé would say, let's get right to it!

The Apprentice

So, the programme we all love to watch/hate/love is back on the box not very long after the last series concluded, due to a delay last year -- and aren't we all glad it's back! That's a rhetorical question; I will not tolerate it being answered in the negative, for it is a positive godsend for lovers of those moronic business-worshipping candidates and the wonderfully degrading missions they get sent on, supposedly to prove their business acumen (but really to shame themselves most gloriously in front of the...

Like the band The Hives, I hate to say I told you so. But I did! In these very pages I speculated that no programmes were making it onto our TVs because we were in the run-up to (whisper it) the Royal Wedding and that "Doctor Who" would prove the catalyst for the return onto our screens of quality fare. And lo and be-bloody-hold, what should happen but that I be proven a prophet in my own country? Scanning the guide for the telly-box at the start of this week, upon returning from my Must-Somehow-Escape-Wills-and-Kate holiday, what did I see but a veritable trove of hammy British actors all strutting their stuff: John Simm and Jim Broadbent getting all family-drama! Brenda Blethyn and Gina McKee doing some scenery chewing! Olivia Williams, er, acting! Chiwetel Ejiofor and Christopher Eccleston! In something that's trying to be "The Wire"! And meanwhile, we recently...

Wassup, rockers. It's been a poor week for television, and I only have dregs of exisiting programmes to offer you. Is this Recession Britain, at long last? Has everything decent totally disappeared? Where is the effervescent cauldron of creativity that once was? Is the whole country just sitting back, watching DVDs of "The Killing" and waiting for "Doctor Who"'s sexy return? Anyway, here are the remains of the day. Enjoy!

Masterchef

Upon first viewing, I originally dismissed this new season of "Masterchef" -- the show that promises to find the best amateur cook in Britain, even though surely the best amateur cook in Britain wouldn't have waited so many seasons to reveal himself or herself . The early elimination rounds had been souped up into really overheated drama and were somehow not as compelling as they had used to be in past seasons, which often found hapless wannabes cooking inedible...

Do you ever feel sometimes that Nasa is messing with us? I don't mean that in a conspiracy "I have newspaper clippings all over my wall and a tendency to mumble to myself" theorist sort of way. I mean to say, in a totally sane manner, that some Nasa images do not look real. What do you think, my little solar flares? (Nasa)

I have no trouble believing, however, that 27% of congressional communication consists of taunting. Congress is fluent in "taunt" "snide" and "derision." (Washington Post)

Obviously the liberal taunts will be more thoughtful and complex than the conservative taunts because liberal brains are shaped differently. Don't yell at me!! It's science! Probably. (Good)

What languages are you fluent in, my nimble-tongued polyglots? This infographic rates languages from easiest to hardest. I'll admit that out of the five languages I speak, only one is out of the "easy" green zone.

University Challenge

So did you see it? The great TV event of the week -- nay, of the year -- took place on Monday. I'm talking, bien sur, about the final of "University Challenge" -- the program wherein teams of four students from the greatest universities in the land, and some less great ones, square off against each other in the hopes of being named Brainiest Brainbox Boffin Brains. The way it works, if you don't live in the country or are the sort of backward half-mind who doesn't watch "University Challenge" and prefers to live in your pigswill-stained hovel with no books, is that the teams have to buzz to answer one question that is open to both of them, and upon winning that starter question, get to tackle three more.

Or, as the fabulous Jeremy Paxman put it at the start of the show, "if you don't know the rules by now,...

Slainte, my salacious celery stalks and pickled string beans. This article, which breaks down the individual flavor components of a Bloody Mary, made my mouth water. Listen, my sweet sots, you don't have to compromise on taste when looking to get a vodka buzz. If you're ever out in the city by the Bay, you should join me for Sunday, Bloody Mary, Sunday at Zeitgiest. Their Bloody Marys come with essentially an entire salad in the glass. S'wonderful. (NPR)

Now, I will admit to you, my little pinto beans, I've never thought about breaking my tacos down into their individual components (if you are sniggering, I will slap you). However, these photographs of taco ingredients as seen through a microscope lens are jaw-dropping. Don't worry, they didn't do chorizo, we all know an extreme close-up of chorizo will just reveal porcine tears and regret. (Micro Taco)

This is another experiment in extreme close-up photography and,...

Hi everyone. Ok, I've only got two programmes this week as one of them, "Comic Relief", took up about 144 hours. It was agony. Ok, on to the programmes!

Christopher and His Kind

So, Matt Smith of "Doctor Who" fame got jiggy with a certain young man named Caspar on Saturday. Oh yes. It was - well, how shall I put it? Vigorous, shall we say. Turns out Matt Smith is quite the lover!

Oh kids, kids, kids! Before you go getting all outraged or hot under the collar, let me say right off the bat that I did not personally get down on the good foot and do the bad thing with Matt Smith on Saturday night -- no, t'was merely a character called Caspar, playing the lover of Christopher Isherwood in "Christopher and His Kind," in which Smith played the titular chappie! Still, it was a bit weird to...

Dear readers, wasn't that a sad ending to "Being Human" this week, eh? Well, not if you considered Aiden Turner's oily-haired vampire a boring enigma-by-numbers and a witless rent-a-menace who had it coming -- in which case, it was a real treat. Anyway, on to the programmes that we all actually want to talk about! These are them:

Waking The Dead

"Waking The Dead" returned this week for its tenth (Tenth!) and final series, and still seems to be on fairly decent form, although you can also see why the BBC is going to be giving it the chop after this run. By now, the mechanics of the show are so well-worn, you can hear it grinding and clunking as it travels through the motions: eerie, fog-filled set-up introducing a mysterious death or disappearance; arguments between the wise psychologist (Sue Johnston), the grounded forensics expert (Tara FitzGerald) and the...

Spoiler alert: I've got a killer segue lined up for the transition from "Jamie's Dream School" to "South Riding"! You're going to love it. That being said, on to the programmes.

Jamie's Dream School

The prog that everyone's talking about right now in Britain is "Jamie's Dream School", a title that puts the 'moron' in 'oxymoron'. Indeed, the weird establishment staffed by celebrities for drop-out students, under the watchful eye of the Naked Chef himself, is so far from being a dream school that I caught myself humming 'Gangsta's Paradise' halfway through the first episode.

So the idea of "Dream School" is that Jamie Oliver, drawing on the experience that saw him revolutionise school dinners for ten minutes back in 2005, gets some cool slebs to sort out the youngsters and inspire them and turn their lives around, or something like that. So he has David Starkey, the famous(ly pompous and creepy) historian,...

Holla! This week I bring you the final episode of the majestic "The Promise," get back to grips with "Skins" and find it worth sticking with, and -- saving my vitriol for last -- wonder what the hell is happening to the world as I attempt to watch "Mrs Brown's Boys." It's a mixed bag, to say the least.

The Promise

"The Promise", Peter Kosminsky's riveting and painful examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1946 and the present day, concluded on Sunday. It has been by far the best programme of the year, and for quite some time that I can think of. It is one of those shows in which every detail feels perfectly researched and created, and everyone brings a fierce, convincing commitment to their roles. Everything was at the service of an immaculate, difficult, long and devastating series that successfully shed a compassionate light on a very tangled matter.

I know by now that most of you have read (or at least read a summary of) Lawrence Wright's astonishing "New Yorker" article on Scientology. In it he and writer/director-of-dubious-talent Paul Haggis unveil the troubling and criminal aspects of the church and its more powerful members. When I read the article, my feelings of ambivalence towards Scientology evaporated. Those involved were not only cuckoo birds of the highest magnitude, but (at least at the very top) completely nefarious individuals. Now, the folks on this list may only be guilty of willful ignorance about the Scientology and its practices or serious gullibility when it comes to the stranger tenets of the church, but their association taints my good opinion of them nonetheless. That is to say, I don't think these folks are monsters, some of them, in fact, were born into the church and I understand, from the "New...

Hello all. This week we have a new take on a classic by Andrew Davies, a cookery show outstaying its welcome, and a new legal drama from Peter Moffatt. Dem's the shows: let's get right to the bitchy take-down of them, eh?

South Riding

The scene: the office of Andrew Davies, famous screenwriter behind the adaptations of "Bleak House," "Middlemarch," and "Pride & Prejudice" (the one with Colin Firth and the pond). Andrew Davies is sitting at a desk piled high with Penguin Classics.

Andrew Davies: (Sigh)

A young man enters. It's Peter, Andrew Davies' assistant.

Andrew Davies: Well, what have you got?

Peter: Mr Davies, sir, I...

Andrew Davies (shouting): Call me Andy! So? What classics have you got for me?

Peter: Well, I've been reading Tolstoy like you told me to, and...

Andrew Davies: Yes, boy, yes, yes? Can I adapt him? Is he any good?...

Guten tag, meine Damen und Herren! How are you doing? This week was a slightly fallow period for TV, even if I did watch good episodes of "The Promise" and "Skins" -- but since I wrote about those fairly recently I'll save them up for a later once-over. In the meantime, I've got a recap on an old favourite and all the celeb goss from the Baftas. Let's do it.

The British Academy Film Awards

That's the Baftas, to you and me. You know: the awards show that desperately strives to be something more important than a jumped-up church fete with prizes for best silly walk and best runner-up-who-tried-really-hard-and-would-have-won-if-only-he-were-American. You know: the awards show that can't do any better than get Jonathan Ross, who has exactly zero worldwide cachet, to present it. Oh come on, you know the one: the awards show that's got slightly less traction and credibility in showbusiness than the Golden Globes.

This week, I bring you three programmes that all centre on issues of displacement. How about that, eh? I bet you're pretty impressed. "Look at that!", you're probably thinking, "Caspar's really nailed the theme this week! Pity, because he totally failed to identify the over-arching theme of alienation five weeks ago." Which I think is a bit churlish of you. Can't we all just agree that I absolutely killed this week's theme and get on with things? Jeez.

Outcasts

'Outcasts' is the big new drama on the BBC block at the moment, with a bunch of intergalactic pioneers taking refuge on a foreign planet called (in an instance of someone at the Beeb, high on brainstorming adrenaline, clearly thinking it sounded totally mega - before everyone realised too late that it makes literally no sense whatsoever) Carpathia. In this hostile world, they have set up a fragile sort...

Ok listen up y'all, I was really busy this week so I only watched two shows, and completely at the last minute, at that. These are the shows!

Skins

So, "Skins" started its fifth series this week, and if you've never seen "Skins" before I'm guessing you're over 19 years old. For that particular category of losers -- and, seriously, how pathetic are you? -- I'll lay out the following summary: it's about kids in Bristol, and the shit they get up to. I've not watched every single episode of it, but when the series started about four years ago or so, I watched it quite frequently and found it funny, endearing, moving, sometimes wise, and full of spunk and heart. Since the second season concluded, packing off Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel et al off to university at the end of two action-packed years of heartbreak and shenanigans, I've occasionally...

Hello everyone, and haven't I got some great television for you this week! Oh I'm sorry, I meant: I haven't got some great television for you this week! I'm going to be wittering on about two Ok programs (one of which I hate) and one outright disappointment. And now, with your appetites all fully whetted for this stellar line-up, let's proceed to the shows!

Being Human

I'm new to "Being Human," so I've got a little bit to catch up on, but as far as I was able to make out from hearsay it's about a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire who all live together in the normal world. You know: the world that you and I live in, like normal people. Wouldn't it be wack if there were supernatural beings walking around amongst us? Eh? God that would be wild.

In this opening episode to Series 3, the hunky...

Hello all. Let's do this.

Come Fly With Me

My flatmate Dan: Oh dear, Caspar - was that, er, was that the brilliant new comedy from Matt Lucas and David Walliams, about people working for an airline, that I heard coming from your room?

Me: Why yes, Daniel, that's correct, indeed it was the brilliant new comedy "Come Fly With Me" that you heard me watching in my bedroom, yes. Why do you ask? It's nothing to be ashamed of! Unless you're one of these new politically correct sociopaths I keep hearing about in the biased liberal media, who think it's not funny to black up or poke fun at gay people - which I trust you aren't.

Dan: Oh lord, no! There's nothing I like better than to laugh at blacks, and women, and lower class people!

Me: Quite. "Lol", as they say.

Dan: Yup. Lol. But, erm, I...

Darts World Championships

Surely there cannot be a better time, if you're a real sports lover, than the start of the year, which offers up the Darts World Championships at Lakeside in Essex and then, in quick succession, the Snooker Masters championship at Wembley.

Come on. Can anyone think of a better example of two great sporting events occurring so close to each other? No. No one can. The French Tennis Open and the final of the football European Cup occur quite close to each other, I think, but seriously, let's not start comparing football (a nice enough game, if you're into that sort of thing) and darts (the sport of kings). Football would never recover.

Darts -- for our American cousins, people of other nationalities and sheer heathens who don't know or appreciate darts -- is a game for morons, by morons. It consists of throwing arrows at a board.

If you are uninitiated in the world of British television (despite the best efforts of the illustrious Caspar Salmon) you may not be familiar with the show Misfits. I can't really blame you for that, as it has only had one season of six episodes on the E4 channel, or for us Americans, The Internet. The show follows the (mostly illegal) exploits of five young people working off community service for various petty crimes. During one of their shifts they are hit with a freak electrical storm that gives them each a super power that relates to their personality (some less subtly than others). Simon can become invisible because he feels ignored, Curtis can turn back time because he threw away a promising future, Alisha can make men go into a sexual frenzy just by touching them because she is a whore, and Kelly can read people's minds because the...

Pajiba readers, welcome! My name is Caspar Salmon, and this little ol' weekly column here exists so that you can hear about what's hot and what's, er, cold, I suppose, on British television right now. Let's just skip right to the shows, shall we?

Getting On

When my beloved grandmother was living in an old people's home a few years ago, in the days when she was sadly no longer quite the sharp-minded person she had once been, we were all sitting around in her room, chatting, when she took something out of her handbag, examined it intently through her thick glasses and then, having decided that it must be some sort of treat, began to eat it. After a short while, I noticed that she was crunching down on it quite hard, with an expression of workmanlike disgust.

Me: Oh Nan, what on earth are you eating?

Nan (pensively): I don't know.