Reptile Vigilantes

It cannot be easy making a convincing storyline about four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their mutant rat chief, living in the sewers of New York, being overly fond of pizza, and going out of their way to save New York from a copybook gang. To its credit, the movie pulls it off, thanks to in part the disconcertingly attractive journalist April (Megan Fox), the excellent special effects - notably an avalanche and some capers atop the Empire State Building, and an easy-as-pizza-to-digest storyline (call it a bare shell of a plot?) where all key players are inexplicably intertwined. In the balance, an excellent treat for kids, and for adults like yours truly, not a bad deal either

14/20

Too Big a Cataclysm

Too Big to Fail chronicles the events leading to the Great Recession and the implementation of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Specifically, it chronicles the events from the vantage point of HenryPaulson (William Hurt), the Fed Chairman. In this movie, you will find the hubris of Lehman Chief Dick Fuld (James Woods), the oversized egos of the Street’s leading doyens of Investment Banking, the desperate urgency among the players in question to prevent a total collapse of the financial markets, and the resultant patchwork that may have averted an out-and-out meltdown but the shadows of which persist to this day. Unlike Margin Call which is purely fictitious, Too Big to Fail has a documentary-like quality and (presumably) preserves authenticity while showcasing one of the most turbulent weeks/ fortnights in recent human history

14.5/20

The Human Detective

A tragedy in the family, many years ago, leaves Adrian Monk (Tony Shaloub) bereft of family, with OCD, and out of the police detective force, but not shorn of his one-in-a-million detective faculties. With no pretensions to physicality – or even normalcy – Monk uncannily makes connections that no one can, with information that everyone has, and solves cases that befuddle one and all. One of the most successful TV Series of all time, Monk (the protagonist) is aided in no small measure by doting nurse Sharona (Bitty Schram) and the grudgingly admiring detective Leland Stottmeyer (Ted Levine). Monk is one of the best TV series you could possibly watch – and in its genre, while it misses the “analytical intensity” of say a CSI, its not-infrequent dark overtones steer it clear of the frivolity of other successful crime series’ such as Castle and Psych

16/20