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Well it's winter and not even the fun holiday-season of winter, that's behind us, now it is just cold. It's hard to want to do anything because of the weather and the daylight being much shorter. But that is great for one thing: television! This time of year is the best time for television and just binging a bunch of shows! I know there's a lot to choose from so I've create a list that covers the most important types of shows and the best ones you should be watching right now.

Best New Hit Show: “The Good Place”

This category is both the easiest and the hardest to do, easiest because this show just started this season so there's only a few episode which means less time to catch up! In that same token, it is the hardest because then you have to keep consistent following along with it...

No threat is too great to stop athletes chasing Olympic dreams. Not less-than-ideal conditions in their living quarters, not pollution and safety concerns and for many, certainly not the Zika virus. But that hasn't stopped the virus from being a topic of discussion in the lead-up to the games. Here's what some of the top athletes competing in Rio have to say about Zika. Hope Solo, 35, SoccerThe goalie first expressed her concerns in February 2016, even going as far as to say that the then-current climate involving Zika would impact her decision to compete. "If I had to make the choice today,...

No threat is too great to stop athletes chasing Olympic dreams. Not less-than-ideal conditions in their living quarters, not pollution and safety concerns and for many, certainly not the Zika virus. But that hasn't stopped the virus from being a topic of discussion in the lead-up to the games. Here's what some of the top athletes competing in Rio have to say about Zika. Hope Solo, 35, SoccerThe goalie first expressed her concerns in February 2016, even going as far as to say that the then-current climate involving Zika would impact her decision to compete. "If I had to make the choice today,...

The snuggle is real. It's winter. It's cold. Why not take a page from these puppies' books and get your blanket game on point! Millions of dogs across the world are busy being absolutely adorable while surrounded by daybeds, throw pillows, and oversized human clothing. If you're like us, you spend a healthy 7 to 8 hours of day scrolling through Instagram photos of cute pets while saying "awwww!" repeatedly across the office. If you don't have time for that—we've compiled some precious highlights! The more you scroll, the more your heart will melt! Enjoy:...

Feature James Clayton 10 Jan 2014 - 06:24

The new year brings with it a wave of sombre dramas. James provides a solemn guide to these serious movies...

Real talk: it's high time you wiped that silly smile of your face, sunshine. We're in serious and sombre season and a cheery disposition is inappropriate during this difficult period. Please show some respectful decorum and put on your best po-face. Act accordingly, for these are grave times and we're grappling with grave issues.

Now that you've adopted the expression of an Easter Island statue you're ready to trip off to the cinema and watch all the sobering films that are being screened. Indeed, if you look at the release schedule for the next few weeks you'll found that there are a lot of solemn affairs on the slate and making their way into movie houses to exert an ominous presence. Expect much...

★★★★★

The Coen brothers return to the London Film Festival this year with the barnstorming Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a picaresque odyssey following the close-calls and mishaps of an also-ran folk songster within the New York Greenwich Village scene. It's the early sixties, well before Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary, and folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac, who also recorded his own tracks for the film) is waiting for his big break. It's winter in New York and his adventures are both comically trivial - he loses a friend's cat - and potentially dramatic - as he's just got his friend's wife, Jean (Carey Mulligan), pregnant.

Staring at the big success-shaped hole called failure, Llewyn snatches at the opportunity of a trip to Chicago where he may be able to persuade some big-time impresario to back him after the loss of the other half of his duo. Davis...

Film 2012 is back at last – but too late and not for long; tussling over a title; and when Salles met Senna

Film falls from favour at the Beeb

Jonathan Ross's announcement that he is to host a new, populist film review show on ITV should send shivers down the already frail BBC arts spine. The Beeb's long-running film programme Film 2012 returns this week on Wednesday night, having been off-air for a scandalously long time and missed the year's most important film events, from Cannes, Toronto and Venice, through the summer blockbuster season, to the release of Skyfall. What's the point of that?

The show, hosted by Claudia Winkleman and Danny Leigh (above), has smartly avoided critical ire in the film community by inviting most of the nation's critics on to the show at some point (myself included). But, whatever one thinks of the programme's odd chemistry, it...

★★★☆☆ Released by Artificial Eye on 28 May, The Rafi Pitts Collection brings together three of the Iranian director's most pivotal films, from the pastoral drama of Sanam (2000) through to the Tehran-based, melancholic revenge movie The Hunter (2010), via his Berlinale hit It's Winter (2006). All three films share a focal interest in the role of men in modern Iran, and whilst Pitts may not quite be in the same league as your Jafar Panahis or Nuri Bilge Ceylan (both key exponents of Islam-centric cinema), he is undoubtedly a fluid storyteller.

Read more »...

With the Us and Israel insisting that "all options remain open, including military action, if Iran continues with its uranium enrichment program" and Iran snapping back that it'll stage "a reciprocal attack" if provoked, as the AP reports today, a little speed-bump in the Oscar race looks pretty damn trivial. Nonetheless, in today's Observer, Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports that "Masoud Ferasati, an Iranian writer whose views are close to those of the Islamic regime, said [recently on state-run television]: 'The image of our society that A Separation depicts is the dirty picture westerners are wishing for.' Ferasati added that political motivations were behind the many awards for Iranian films in the past two decades, and said an Oscar for A Separation should not be welcomed by Iranians." According to Dehghan, though, many "ordinary Iranians," have indeed welcomed the slew of awards Asghar Farhadi's film has garnered, beginning with the Golden and...

“Am I really doing this?” I asked, fear wrapping around my words like a python.

“Oh, don't be such a baby,” Morris told me. “This'll be fun.”

“This is Mordor,” I said. “This is the Black Tower of Barad-Dur, and I'm surrounded by orcs.”

“No, this is the Black Tower of Macy's.”

“Orcs, though.”

“Nope. Staten Islanders.”

I cursed fate. “And me without a sword,” I lamented.

All right, for those of you who've never had the misfortune of being in New York at Christmastime, let me just say it is insane with a capital Crazy. I understand that Manhattan is a crowded little island, but for the most part it never feels that tightly-packed. Usually I glide through the streets of New York with a spring in my step, gleefully evading my fellow pedestrians with nary an errant stride.

But then baby Jesus has to come and pinch out...

It appears that not a single Tsa agent has declined to perform a full-body pat down of airline passengers. That includes patting down small children. They're not patted down on a routine basis, but on some occasions they can be and they are. A child under 12, sometimes way under 12, may be required to remove outer clothing and be touched on such areas as the genitals.

Would you take this job? I don't believe I would. But it's worth reflecting that employment as a Tsa agent is a good job in these hard times of high unemployment. The starting pay is $12.85 an hour, better than Wendy's for an employee who doesn't need a high school diploma. Wages go higher. The 40 hours of training are paid for by the government. Agents are given uniforms, badges, "a choice of health care plans," and power.

When they were first hired, the job consisted of...

A spare, brooding drama from Iran that is perhaps not entirely successful but is certainly intriguing, writes Peter Bradshaw

Rafi Pitts is the Iranian-born director of the powerful 2006 movie It's Winter, and has a reputation for being a poet of emotions and for making films that look beautiful. Both are certainly true of his new film The Hunter, which intriguingly eludes generic pigeonholing. Perhaps not entirely deliberately, Pitts has made a movie with an identity crisis. As it continues, the film appears to change from being a static study of character into a more active drama, and then into an out-and-out suspense thriller. In none of these forms is The Hunter entirely successful, to be honest, but it has flavour and character and poise, and the cinematographer Mohammad Davudi creates some superb images.

Pitts himself plays Ali, a guy with a fierce, if mostly silent sense of pride; he resents his demeaning manual labouring job,...

Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men is the latest in a long line of great Iranian movies

The first decade of the 21st century has been an extraordinary time for Iranian film-makers, starting with joint Caméra d'Or wins for Hassan Yektapanah's Djomeh and Bahman Ghobadi's A Time for Drunken Horses at the 2000 Cannes film festival. Since then we have been treated to such wildly differing visions as Rafi Pitts's haunting It's Winter, with its oddly epic sense of domestic turmoil, and Jafar Panahi's Offside, arguably the best football movie ever made. In 2008 Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis picked up an Oscar nomination, while in 2010 Cannes favourite Abbas Kiarostami steered Juliette Binoche to a best actress award in Certified Copy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the problems of film-making in Iran (Panahi was unable to sit on the jury at Cannes this year because he was in prison for allegedly...

If you watched the season finale of Breaking Bad last night (side note: holy fucking shit, right? Can't wait for season four), you saw that AMC ran a sneak preview of its new show, "Rubicon," premiering August 1. AMC Originals are either hit ("Mad Men," "Breaking Bad") or miss (their remake of the miniseries The Prisoner) and the jury's still out on "Rubicon" after one episode. The show stars James Badge Dale ("The Pacific," "24") as Will Travers, a code breaker with the American Policy Institute in New York. He's pensive, mopey and unnaturally smart, throwing out factoids like the annual military spending of Croatia at the drop of a hat. He's a crossword puzzle whiz, which also serves as the first step in the unhurried build toward what will be the season's lynchpin conflict.

"Rubicon" relies on the tropes of most dramas, like ominous string music and a snail's paced narrative,...

It's winter formal time next week on Life Unexpected. On the episode "Formal Reformed," the following events take place...

... Jones asks Lux to the dance. ... Baze finds a condom in Lux’s room. ... Cate chaperones the event, which brings back painful memories for her about the night Lux was conceived.

Below, we've posted a clip from the installment, which finds Lux in a precarious position with Bug:

Run, Bug!

As always, we'll recap and review this episode after it airs, publishing the latest Life Unexpected music and quotes from the hour.

Until then, enjoy another clip from the series.

Formal Reformed Clip...

It's winter. It's cold out. So grab a glass of hot chocolate and read the following: Actor Kellan Lutz is going to take a break from his five lines per Twilight film to fill out Marky Mark's Calvin Kleins in the brand's new ad campaign, and E!'s Marc Malkin reports that we can expect to see the pictures next month. Just give him a sword and shield and consider it his Conan callback. [E!]...

So far in the Undead Tech series, I've traced back the roots of some pretty rich items: a $75,000 car Audi, a $200,000 spaceflight, and thousands of dollars in laptops, phones, mountain bikes, and e-readers. This installment will poke around in one colossally important everyday technology--one that buys us geographical freedom for the price of a hot dog. It's winter, in a crippling economic recession. Lets talk about the lowly subway train, which, like this beloved Internet of ours, is a series of tubes. (Below, a station in Prague, via Flickr.)

Boston was the first American city to sport a real underground train; the Tremont Street subway line went subterranean in 1897, pioneering the modern system Bostoners call the T. Until the Tremont line's underground section, Boston's trains had been street-level and powered by steam, and worked alongside a streetcar system dating back to 1856 that used horse-drawn cars. Streetcar congestion was the impetus for the new underground trains.

Berlin -- Martin Scorsese's thriller "Shutter Island" starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" featuring Ewen McGreggor and Pierce Brosnan will have their world premieres in Berlin.

"Shutter Island" will screen out of competition but Polanski's latest will be in the running for Berlin's Golden Bear.

Berlin unveiled the first festival titles Tuesday and alongside the big names, there are several international arthouse veterans. "Honey" from Turkish auteur Semih Kaplanoglu, the final film in his "Milk," "Egg" and "Honey" trilogy, made the competition cut, as did "The Robber" from German director Benjamin Heisenberg ("Sleeper").

Bosnia helmer Jasmila Zbanic, whose debut "Grbavica" won the Golden Bear in 2006, will return to Berlin with the world premiere of her follow-up: "On the Path."

Iran's Rafi Pitts ("It's Winter") will head to Berlin with his new drama "The Hunter" and Bollywood extravaganza "My Name is Khan," from Karan Johar and...

Jls have expressed disappointment over their lack of long-term girlfriends, claiming that they are finding it difficult to find trustworthy women. The former X Factor boyband told The Sun that they have not been impressed enough by the ladies they have met recently. Band member Marvin Humes commented: "We get girls throwing themselves at us. But it's difficult to find a girl you can trust. It's winter, we're going home to our cold beds on our (more)...

Cologne, Germany -- Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody ("Juno"), producer In-Ah Lee ("Don't Come Knocking") and Iranian director Rafi Pitts ("It's Winter") make up the jury for this year's First Feature film award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The prize, endowed with 50,000 euros ($65,000), goes to the producer and director of a debut feature screening in one of the Berlinale's main sections: competition, Panorama, Forum and Generation.

The jury will announce the 2009 First Feature winner Feb. 14 at the official Berlinale awards ceremony.