Top TV & movies

Television

Best

• Homicide: Life on the Street (ITV4, United Kingdom)

Gritty, compelling, and the best thing on the small screen, anywhere. Every shot made with the highest standards. 10 out of 10 for acting, script, music and philmography, episode by episode. Each character has more depth to it than you ever expect on an American TV drama. Real crime, real police work, none of Hollywood's bullshit.

• West Wing

• Battlestar Galactica

• Monk

• Push, Nevada

An IRS (the US Internal Revenue Service) investigator is the unlikely protagonist of a paranoid tale of suspense. Agent Prufrock encounters a conspiracy that seems to encompasses everyone he comes across in a backwater town in Nowhere, USA.

Good fun (not in any particular order):

• 30 Rock
• American dad
• Family Guy (That's just like that sitcom except nobody laughs. No, wait, it's the same.)

Peter Griffin is the 21st century obese version of 1970s' Archie Bunker, except more loudmouth and less bigoted. The remainder of the animated cast is gang of irreverent basket-cases 'filmed' delivering an continuous sequence of gags.

• Green Wing [Interview with actors]

A gang of deranged eccentrics has taken over a contemporary British establishment. (Hard to imagine, is it not?) The cast is engaged by perverse obsessions and carries itself through the most bizarre conduct. Embarrassing, surprising, sacrilegious, and once you take the ride, also very funny.

• Weeds
• Southpark (Comedy Central)

A uniquely imbecile humour poking fun at America's holiest cows. The show's cast includes a greedy Jewish lawyer, power-demented celebrities, a sex-obsessed black, corpse-hungry journalists, a promiscuous single mother, catholic paedophile priests, and a 3rd-grade child who dies on almost every episode. Irreverent and often genuine jabs are taken at social conventions, exposing hypocrisy left and right. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's anarchistic characters pay no lip service to institutionalized religion, political correctness, or any form of political hypocrisy. Hilarious or stupid, it's not boring.

Cinema

My personal favourites are science fiction movies: see separate page

Not in any particular order

• Short Cuts. R. Altman, 1993
• Amadeus, Milos Forman, 1984.

The most powerful music ever written (Requiem KV 341) is here more than just a soundtrack. In scene 5 (22:00), scene 25 (102:00), scene 34 (136:00), and scene 36 (143:00), Murray Abraham 'killing' Mozart by blackmailing him to write his own death mass.

• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson, 2001
• Eddie Murphy Raw, 1987

Eddie Murphy loses whatever politically-correct inhibitions others may have, live on stage, having a go at blacks, gays, women, men, celebrities, and himself. Dirty fun.

• Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino, 1991
• Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme, 1991
• Snatch, Guy Ritchie
• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie
• Fight Club, 1999
• Event Horizon, Paul Anderson/Philip Eisner, 1997
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron, 1991
• Total Recall, Paul Verhoeven, 1990