SLOW HORSES: SEASON ONE Starring: Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Olivia Cooke QUENTIN The synopsis for Slow Horses includes the following language: “MI5 rejects (read: failed spies) must endure dull, paper pushing tasks and their miserable boss, Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), who expects them to quit out of boredom and frustration.” Surely it wasn’t by design, but the series seems to want the audience to do the same. The central story is blandly unfocused, which, when coupled with the British dryness of it all, makes it tough for the audience to become invested. I admit Oldman is fairly entertaining as a flatulent old curmudgeon, but he can only take the show so far by himself.

IT: WELCOME TO DERRY: SEASON ONE Starring: Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Stephen Rider, Matilda Lawler, Amanda Christine, Clara Stack, Blake Cameron James, Arian S. Cartaya, Chris Chalk, Thomas Mitchell, Peter Outerbridge, Kimberly Guerrero, Joshua Odjick, Madeleine Stowe, James Remar, and Bill Skarsgård Creators: Jason Fuchs, Andy Muschietti, and Barbara Muschietti ROBERT I’m not a purveyor of Stephen King lore, but the IT films were simultaneously accessible and high-concept horror done successfully. When Welcome to Derry came to my attention, it seemed like director Andy Muschietti was wading back to his main life raft before the dregs of The Flash . How much could still be unpacked about Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård)? As it turns out, quite a bit, as the showrunners weave in a few King properties to tell a compelling story to build on the mythology. Skarsgård is as unhinged and maniacal as ever in his comfort role, and while schlocky, the show is thoughtful and refreshingly emotional. QUENTIN When it comes to horror television, genre fans are often left wanting because networks tend to keep scares tame to appease broader audiences and advertisers. Thankfully, HBO’s Welcome to Derry isn’t concerned with that. From a pure horror perspective, it’s terrifying and unsettling in all the ways Chapter One is, full of atmospheric dread and gruesome delights. The Stephen King Easter Eggs are a nice touch, too. However, as a beginning-to-end narrative, the story has enough scattered lulls that one’s attention might wander. It also somewhat reduces Pennywise’s (Bill Skarsgård) fear factor by overexplaining his origins. Still, evoking a sharper-edged Stranger Things , Derry is worth visiting. PAIGE Welcome to Derry is a bonkers addition to the IT franchise. Admittedly, its plot is scattered, and some of the CGI is downright horrendous; however, when creator Andy Muschietti and team lean into the suspenseful score, practical effects, and real life terrors, the nightmares come to life. You'll really feel like you’re stuck in Derry too. The series also does a compelling job of building the mythology surrounding Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). While the mythos may take away some of the mystery that makes him so daunting, that expansion manages to deepen the intrigue about the entity. Another thing the series has going for it is that it does a killer job of weaving in lore from other Stephen King properties.

SERVANT: SEASON FOUR Starring: Lauren Ambrose, Toby Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free, and Rupert Grint Creators: Tony Basgallop and M. Night Shyamalan QUENTIN One universal complaint about M. Night Shyamalan’s body of work is his propensity to deliver bum endings after intriguingly terrific set ups, and Servant , which was meant to be six seasons before being culled down to four, is yet another victim. Truth be told, this series has become less and less interesting with each passing season, and this final group of episodes struggles to maintain momentum, answer questions proposed over the entire series’ run, or make the viewer care about the fact that this story is ending. It just fizzles out, like Shyamalan ultimately got bored with the series, which is fair because so did I.

Previous Next September 28, 2025 In a year where Warner Bros. has brought hit after hit, they have seemingly released another critical hit with One Battle After Another, an action-crime drama from the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson, featuring the talents of Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benecio Del Toro, and relative newcomer Chase Infiniti. Join Nick, Amarú, and Matt as they dive further into the twists and turns the story takes, the performances from this star-studded ensemble, and what this film could potentially do come awards season. Click HERE to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all of our latest video content including our interviews, and be sure to give us a thumbs up and comment your thoughts!

DUTTON RANCH: SEASON ONE Starring: Cole Hauser, Kelly Reilly, Finn Little, Juan Pablo Raba, Jai Courtney, J.R. Villarreal, Marc Menchaca, Natalie Alyn Lind, Ed Harris, and Annette Bening Creator: Chad Feehan QUENTIN Even as a Yellowstone fan, I can admit the latter seasons came with diminishing returns on most every front, with Cole Hauser’s Rip being perhaps the lone exception. As such, centering a spinoff around him and Beth (Kelly Reilly) made perfect sense, and thankfully, it works. New showrunner Chad Feehan skillfully blends familiarity with freshness, and putting Hauser, Reilly, and their tremendous chemistry front and center — alongside sparkplug Jai Courtney and icons Annette Bening and Ed Harris — reinvigorates the troubled franchise. Granted, bitch-ass teenager Carter (Finn Little) wears thin, but overall, the new sandbox and absence of Yellowstone creator and showrunner Taylor Sheridan has done wonders.

MARE OF EASTTOWN Starring: Kate Winslet, Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Angourie Rice, John Douglas Thompson, Joe Tippett, Cameron Mann, Jack Mulhern, Izzy King, Neal Huff, James McArdle, Guy Pearce, David Denman, Evan Peters, Cailee Spaeny, and Robbie Tann Creator: Brad Ingelsby JACOB You'd be hard-pressed to find something to dislike about HBO's Mare of Easttown . The detective procedural, directed by Craig Zobel, is the perfect vehicle for a miniseries of this scale. It's never grandiose and seldom epic, but it's always engaging, consistently challenging the characters and never seeking easy routes to resolution. It's Spotlight by way of True Detective , a combo that works brilliantly as the writing supports every facet of Kate Winslet's Pennsylvanian detective, a performance Winslet genuinely pulls off perfectly. Nothing about this series is meant to be mind-blowing, but it's as excellent (and excellently-crafted) as it is believable.

Previous Next March 10, 2024 WRITTEN BY: THE BITESIZE CREW Time for the Bitesize Crew to predict the 96th Academy Awards. Which film is walking away with the most hardware? Will it be Emma or Lily? Do you even care, or are you just watching to see Ryan Gosling sing?

Previous December 31, 2024 Next A BITESIZE CHAT WITH BRANDON CRONENBERG Filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg (Possessor) joins us to talk about his newest release, Infinity Pool , the current state of horror, and the future of his burgeoning film career. BB: You experimented with the visual language of [Infinity Pool ] quite a bit, which made it really exciting to watch. Were there any scenes in particular that were difficult to shoot, but turned out better than you had hoped for? BC: It was all kind of difficult to shoot because we were on a pretty tight indie schedule, and that was more challenging, I think, than the kind of hallucinatory scenes, the more formally stylistic stuff. That stuff was fun, but a lot of it is done [with] you taking material and re-photographing it, so it was a bit more leisurely whereas the main shoot was a bit hectic. I think, to me, the hardest sequence was probably the home invasion. We had one day to do that whole sequence, and it’s probably, you know, two and a half days of shooting if we were able to take our time. But, yeah, I’m really happy with how it turned out. BB: With Possessor and Infinity Pool , there is this power dynamic between the elite and the lower body person. Has this concept always grabbed you, or would you like to deviate from that discussion in subsequent films? BC: It isn't the case that I think about it on a film-to-film basis. I mean, I wrote Infinity Pool before we shot Possessor , but after I’d written the script for Possessor . So, maybe there were certain thematic elements that made their way into [Infinity Pool ’s] script that I wasn’t sure I was going to even be able to tackle in Possessor because that film kept falling apart, over and over again, for the better part of eight years. So, there’s some overlap, probably. In that sense, that was where my head was at. But at the same time, I also think that the power dynamic of the economic divide is something that’s only becoming a more difficult-to-tackle issue. So, you know, you kind of pull the tensions that you see around you in the world into your work and process them in that way. BB: The rating of the film was brought down from an NC-17 to an R rating. What was the process like for you to make those changes to kind of fit those guidelines? BC: It's a process that very directly involves the MPAA because you send a film to them, they tell you, “this would be NC-17,” and you say, “okay, give us some feedback.” [Then] you work with an MPAA consultant…actually, Neon has an MPAA consultant who I work with…[he] sort of interprets their feedback for you in a way that’s hopefully a little bit more specific and practical. Then you just go back and forth. In our case, we tried to appeal at one point. So, I actually had to fly to LA, go to Sherman Oaks, to the MPAA headquarters, and it’s like putting your film on trial a little bit. They have a room full of people…apparently, there’s a priest there, that’s part of the requirements…and you screen the film, and you sort of make a case for why this should be R. Actually, weirdly, the MPAA representatives agreed with us in that case, that we had made our case, but we split the room five to five, and you need two thirds. So, we made a couple of minor tweaks after that. BB: You got to work with a modern day scream queen in Mia Goth prior to what has become her breakthrough 2022. What was the experience of working with her and the rest of the cast? BC: Interestingly, she was shooting Pearl when we first spoke, when we sent her this script. Those films hadn’t come out when I cast her in the film, and I don’t think we actually saw them until after we had shot. It’s fantastic that she’s having such a big year. I think she’s brilliant. I’ve been wanting to work with her for years. Everything she’s in is another example of how exciting she is as an actor and what a talent she is. It’s funny that she’s had this run of horror films, and is now, you know, the big scream queen because it wasn’t the case when we were shooting or that hadn’t happened yet. But, I mean, she’s an absolute delight to work with and obviously brilliant. BB: Working with actresses like Andrea Riseborough, and now Mia Goth, do you find their performances to be more horrifying than your body horror sequences or vice versa? BC: You know, I don’t know. I lose all perspective as I’m working on it. Certainly, with actors like those, the performances are the exciting part to me. I mean, it’s fun to do the horror stuff. We get incredibly giddy on set and start laughing maniacally when the prosthetics come out and everybody’s being squirted with blood just because it’s… as disturbing as those scenes are for some people to watch, when you actually shoot them, they’re incredibly funny. It’s sort of like playing Halloween. I mean, those are, in a way, the most lighthearted scenes to shoot, so they’re very enjoyable. That’s kind of basic nerdy stuff that is fun, but you can kind of just do it with your friends. To bring on an actor who you’ve never met prior to the film, to have someone inject that kind of life into your characters and into your stories, [is] thrilling in a very particular way. BB: I know a lot of films have working titles when creating them, but I know with this film, the title Infinity Pool has some subtle context. I was wondering if you had any other ideas for titles for this project? BC: No, it actually was the working title. I mean, it was based on a short story, and at one point, there was a kind of short comic version while I was writing the script that came out. It was a very short comic in an anthology comic, and that story was called, I think, “Death in Lee Tolka.” But that was never gonna be the name of the film. BB: How do you feel about the surge of love for horror in recent years? And has the genre changed at all? BC: I’m not sure if it’s [changed] necessarily. I don’t know. I feel like there’s always a market for horror, like from a film industry perspective. Certainly, a lot of my friends are horror fans, and so maybe my perspective is skewed, but it doesn’t seem like anyone has lost a love for the genre. I don’t know. It’s interesting. There’s this move now in the industry to embrace some pretty arty, intriguing horror, and they’re coming out of, you know, Neon and A24. So, I don’t know if it’s just because a market has been carved out and now there’s more interest in making films like that? I’m not sure. But I don’t think that those films are new. I think there has always been arty horror, and there has always been this love for horror films. I think we’re in a pretty interesting place right now because there’s a lot of visibility both with the more mainstream horror and this kind of stuff, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily a completely new thing or that those kinds of films stopped being made at any point. BB: Are there any horror films that stuck out to you over the course of 2022 that you really enjoyed? BC: You know what? I’m just starting to catch up on that stuff. I mean, this is hugely biased, but obviously Mia’s work has really stuck out. But there’s a lot of stuff that I just haven’t [seen], like I’m just now finally catching up to because the editing process was very long and intense on this one. So, there’s a kind of a year’s worth of film that I haven’t had a chance to engage with. So, it seems so self-serving to say X and Pearl , but they were quite good. BB: With both your films being body horror films, the elephant in the room is that your father has a historic legacy in the genre. How has your father impacted your love for body horror as a sub-genre? BC: I don’t know if he has. It’s hard to say. You know, I can’t see my father’s films with any kind of perspective because I’m too close to him. I’m too close to his films. So, I can’t watch his movies the way that normal people watch movies and be influenced in the way that people generally mean by that. Obviously, we’re related and he was a big part of my childhood and still is a big part of my life, but just as a human being. So, as a person, obviously, he influenced me genetically and in terms of my upbringing, but as a filmmaker, it’s hard to say. I can’t really unpack that in the normal way. BB: Are there any films that Inspire your work? BC: The problem is… I watch a bunch of films, usually with Karim Hussain, my cinematographer. He lives pretty close to me, and he’s an encyclopedia of film knowledge. My knowledge is all over the place. I have hugely embarrassing gaps, but he’s seen everything and knows everything. So, we usually will sit down and watch a mass of stuff, and I kind of just pack it into a weird loaf that sits somewhere in the back of my brain. So, it’s kind of hard to remember what we were watching when we were doing marathons in 2020, or 2019, when we sort of started this. I think some of the Steadicam and macro-gore stuff has definitely come from some [Dario] Argento films, you know, Opera and that kind of stuff. But that’s not something specific to this film, those are just incredibly formally stylish genre films. It’s not a very good answer, not a very interesting answer… BB: No, no worries! I appreciate your work because it feels original, and I feel like that’s the twist that you bring to the table with all of your horror films. So, thank you for that. For your future projects, would you ever get into any other genre and try something new? Does that interest you? BC: Absolutely! I mean, I love horror films. I’m happy to be a horror filmmaker. But I’m not trying just specifically to work in that genre. It’s just where my head is at. I’m happy to work outside, I’m just kind of taking these projects one at a time and following my interests. I do have… one of the things I’m working on is an adaptation of a book called Super-Cannes as a limited series, and that’s more of a weird detective story in a way. It’s somewhat horrific, but it’s not necessarily a traditional horror story. It’s a bit more of a surreal procedural. BB: Well, DC just announced they’re doing Swamp Thing . You should definitely throw your name into the ring to James Gunn! BC: Haha, let them know that! I don’t know if Infinity Pool is winning me fans at Warner Bros., but we’ll see. Make sure to check out Infinity Pool now in theatres. Interview conducted on February 2nd, 2023 by Paige Frabetti. Photo Credits: Banner - Rich Polk/Getty Images; Photo 1 - Neon; Photo 2 - Caitlin Cronenberg/The Globe and Mail

Previous Next Chris Hemsworth returns to the role of Tyler Rake in Extraction 2 this week. With that in mind, we figured it was the perfect time for the Bitesize crew to put their brains together to compile Bitesize Breakdown's consensus Top Five Performances from the Original Avengers excluding all MCU performances. Each writer ranks his or her top 15 actors in the category. Those lists are then weighted on a reverse point system. After all the points are tallied up, the entries with the most total points make up the Bitesize Top Five. 5. SCARLETT JOHANSSON - SAMANTHA (HER) It is a rare echelon of quality that successful non-visual performances find themselves in when paired with live-action storytelling, and nowhere is this more apparent than Scarlett Johansson’s heartbreaking vocal turn in Spike Jonze's Her . Johansson’s performance, by my view, is the closest a purely vocal turn has come to being a main category nominee (Best Actress or Supporting Actress), and perhaps it should have been. There are few voice performances so integral to their film’s storytelling, and even fewer still who can manage to both endear and devastate you in the same breath as Johansson does here. - Jacob 4. SCARLETT JOHANSSON - ROSIE (JOJO RABBIT) Jojo Rabbit contains some of the best work of Scarlett Johansson's career, and her performance as the resilient mother of young Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis) is the glue that holds the film together. She brings an enormously endearing quality to Rosie, a character that responds to all situations with an eye on love whether the scene is humourous or heartbreaking. There are a lot of moments in this performance that stick out, but none quite as loudly as the now iconic dinner scene. - Nick 3. JEREMY RENNER - JAMES COUGHLIN (THE TOWN) Damn right Jeremy Renner’s performance in The Town made the cut! As a born and bred Boston girl myself, what Renner is able to capture as a Southie criminal is remarkable. He hits the nail on the head with this performance while mastering the Boston accent exceptionally well. He completely inhabits this role, and makes his character, Jem, feel real and lived in; not to mention he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in this wicked awesome film. - Paige 2. ROBERT DOWNEY JR. - KIRK LAZARUS (TROPIC THUNDER) Even though there are some small circles buzzing online about canceling Robert Downey Jr. because of the blackface of it all, the fact of the matter is that those people probably just don’t get the satire at play here. That aside, RDJ’s Academy Award-, BAFTA-, SAG-, and Golden Globe-nominated performance is flat-out terrific, not only as Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus, but also as SSG Lincoln Osiris. I mean, name another Avenger that could realistically pull off the role of “a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude” with so much humor, intelligence, and nuance. You can’t do it. - Quentin 1. SAMUEL L. JACKSON - JULES WINNFIELD (PULP FICTION) “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers, and you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” What the fuck else do I need to say? - Amarú HONORABLE MENTIONS SAMUEL L. JACKSON - STEPHEN (DJANGO UNCHAINED) JEREMY RENNER - IAN DONNELLY (ARRIVAL) SCARLETT JOHANSSON - NICOLE BARBER (MARRIAGE STORY) CHRIS HEMSWORTH - BILLY LEE (BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE) MARK RUFFALO - DAVID TOSCHI (ZODIAC) Photo Credits: Photo 1, 3 - Warner Bros.; Photo 2 - Fox Searchlight Pictures; Photo 4 - Paramount Pictures Photo 5 - Miramax Films

Previous Next June 13, 2026 Director Steven Spielberg is back, and once again he's tackling his favourite subject, extraterrestrial life. There may have been some close encounters, but now it's truly time for Disclosure Day . Join Amarú, Nick, and Adriano as they discuss the director's return to his summer blockbuster roots and the conclusion to his "thematic trilogy." Click HERE to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all of our latest video content including our interviews, and be sure to give us a thumbs up and comment your thoughts!

Previous Next January 6, 2026 We're heading for The Upside Down one more time as Matt, Amarú, and Paige dive into all three parts of the final season of Stranger Things . Were we satisfied with the ending? Do we want more? Tune in for all our thoughts on Stranger Things: Season Five . Click HERE to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all of our latest video content including our interviews, and be sure to give us a thumbs up and comment your thoughts!

Previous Next March 1, 2025 Welcome to A Bigger Bite, the podcast series where we take a deeper dive into some of our favourite films of the year (spoilers included). With the Oscars coming up, we've decided to launch with an episode for each film the Academy Awards have nominated for Best Picture, releasing an episode each day leading up to the big ceremony. Timothée is back, but this time, as Bob Dylan. Here's A Complete Unknown ! Click HERE to subscribe to our YouTube channel for all of our latest video content including our interviews, and be sure to give us a thumbs up and comment your thoughts!