The Pull List: 6 January 2016, Part I

Due to shipping accident or an intentional attempt to boost the week's market share, Marvel released both Star Wars #14 and Darth Vader #15 to comic shops simultaneously this week. Together they wrap up the six-issue "Vader Down" crossover that they have been running.

In the end it's a masterful conclusion. I complained last week that Chewbacca #5 offered a truncated and unsatisfying climax to that miniseries, before ending with an overly-long and rather tedious epilogue. That simply isn't the case here. The action continues right up to the final pages, and Kieron Gillen offers a two-page final scene that actually packs many times the punch of Chewbacca's in about a fifth of the pages.

These final two issues pack a lot of fighting into them. Vader versus Leia, Han and Chewie versus the Wookiee bounty hunter Krrsantan, Vader versus the Mon Calamari cyborg Karbin, Luke versus Stormtroopers, villainous droids BT-1 and Triple-O versus Stormtroopers, Aphra versus Leia, Krrsantan versus C-3PO. It just keeps piling higher and higher, becoming more and more ridicuous yet more and more hilariously entertaining at the same time. It's plotted and scripted so consistently that you really can't tell that Jason Aaron wrote one issue and Kieron Gillen the other. Mike Deodato's slightly gritty artwork on Star Wars #14 is impressive, but I remain more enamoured with Salvador Larroca's work in Darth Vader #15. He and Gillen make a sensational team.

Altogether this has been a fantastic little event storyline that not only manages to be a fan-pleasing meet-up of heroes and villains but also a genuine step forward in both book's ongoing narratives. It feels like an event that matters, and one that didn't require having read both books beforehand to enjoy. (5/5)

Star Wars #14. Marvel. Written by Jason Aaron. Art by Mike Deodato. Colours by Frank Martin Jr. Darth Vader #15. Marvel. Written by Kieron Gillen. Art by Salvador Larroca. Colours by Edgar Delgado.

Under the cut: reviews of Action Comics, Giant Days and The Sheriff of Babylon.

Split Second (1992)

Harley Stone (Rutger Hauer) is a burnt-out, obsessive police officer in the flooded London of 2008. He remains fixated on the death of his partner several years earlier - a death linked to a series of unsolved ritual murders across the city. With a new partner, the Scottish rookie Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), Stone races to stop the killer before he can kill again.

Remember the glory days of VHS, when your local video store would stock a vast array of direct-to-video genre titles like Moon 44, Slipstream and Society? They were often not very good, but they often boasted the occasional stand-out performance, or clever idea, or innovative special effects. You had to give these films a lot of latitude: with low budgets and short production schedules they could never aspire to be as slick or watchable as a studio-backed theatrical release. For the right viewer in the best possible frame of mind, some of these direct-to-video films seemed genuinely great.

Split Second probably isn't entirely great. It is great, but it's also fairly awful. That's the thing about these kinds of films: they're great, and they're awful. They're both at once. This one has some pretty dreadful dialogue, and a lot of cliches in the plot, but it also has a wonderfully hammy central performance by the amazing Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, Ladyhawke), a beautiful water-logged aesthetic, and a nice genre twist at the film's mid-point. There is no need to rush to see this movie, but at the same time if you ever get the chance it is worth checking out.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 4 in Review

The conventional wisdom is that Star Trek: The Next Generation was a pretty shaky series for its first two years, but 'got good' with its third season. A rewatch of those three seasons showed that assessment to be slightly inaccurate: Season 3 does indeed get much, much better, but it's a transition that takes it much of that season to make. As a result Season 4 is really the first year of the series to be running at a fully superior quality, and that easily makes it the best year for the series thus far.

It's also the year that finally saw the production successfully convince Paramount to let it tell proper ongoing stories. The episodes are suddenly less self-contained. Worf's discommendation and the near-collapse of the Klingon Empire are threaded throughout the series. Picard's traumatic violation at the hands of the Borg gets an entire episode to deal with its aftermath, and it is still a plot point towards the end of the year in "The Drumhead".

Put simply, Season 4 is the first year of the series that actually feels like what we think of when we remember it. This is Star Trek: The Next Generation, fully shaken free from its origins as a sequel and well established as a major American television drama in its own right.

Asako in Ruby Shoes (2000)

U-In (Lee Jung-jae) is a disenfranchised Korean public servant who has a boring life, constantly under-achieves and spends most of his spare time masturbating to Internet pornography. Aya (Misato Tachibana) is a depressed Japanese health centre employee who buys shoes he can't afford and plans to commit suicide by holding her breath. To earn some quick money Aya turns to performing for a soft-core pornographic web site - at which point her and U-In's lives collide.

I really don't know quite what to make of Asako in Ruby Shoes. It is a 2000 comedy drama from Korean writer/director E. J-yong. It effectively tells two stories in parallel. One of them follows an endearing and rather funny young woman struggling to find her place in the world. The other follows a pervert and sex pest, the sort of man who hides in the women's toilets in the hope of glimpsing whatever woman he is currently fixated upon. Lee Jung-jae gives a great and rather engaging performance as Korea's worst slacker, but in truth he's almost too ugly a character to like.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "The Visitor"

It's 9 October 1995, and time for more Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Decades after he left Deep Space Nine Jake Sisko (Tony Todd) lives alone in a house on the Louisiana Bayou. Late one night he receives an unexpected visitor: a young fan of the two books he wrote before abandoning his writing career. To explain to her why he stopped writing, he tells her the story of his life: beginning with the day his father, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), died.

For the most part 1990s Star Trek runs to a broad formula, usually a two-streamed storyline with one half involving some strange space phenomenon or diplomatic issue and the other involving character interaction or somebody's personal crisis. It's a formula that sustained the franchise through four separate TV series, but occasionally an episode comes along that doesn't fit into that mould. Now and then an episode is made that is in effect a self-contained science fiction short story rendered as a Star Trek episode. Since most of the fans of Star Trek are fans of science fiction, these episodes often wind up being among the most popular. "The Visitor" is one of these episodes. It is possibly the single-best episode of Deep Space Nine they ever made.

Eight Asian films coming in 2016

2016 is upon us, and that means a whole new year's worth of feature films coming out. I figured I would have a look ahead and see what is coming and what I am most interested in seeing over the next 12 months. It seemed as good a place as any to begin with Asian cinema. I don't know the release dates for a lot of these films - unlike Hollywood, countries like Hong Kong, China and Japan tend not to set their release dates in stone. At present, however, all of the films mentioned below are supposed to be in cinemas by the end of the year.

Here are the eight films coming out of Hong Kong, China and Japan that have me most excited.

Election 3

Directed by Johnnie To. Starring Andy Lau, Louis Koo, Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Anthony Wong, Nick Cheung, Sammi Cheng, You Yong, Sun Honglei and Gordon Lam.

A veritable who's-who of Johnnie To performers reunite for the long-awaited third instalment of his Election trilogy. This is, in effect, the Godfather of Hong Kong movie franchises, boasting outstanding scripts and performances. While time will tell if this third film will match the quality of the first two (released back in 2005 and 2006), past experience of To's immense talents seems to make it pretty likely that it will.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "The Way of the Warrior"

It's 2 October 1995, and time for the Season 4 premiere of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

A massive Klingon task force arrives in Bajoran space, stopping spacecraft and searching them for Changelings. In order to discover the Klingons' true agenda Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) recruits former Enterprise security chief Lieutenant Commander Worf (Michael Dorn). Worf soon learns the Klingons' real objective is the invasion of Cardassia - where a popular uprising has overthrown the military government.

Deep Space Nine never found the audience enjoyed by The Next Generation. When it began in 1993 it was essentially the secondary series, always overshadowed by its elder sister. Pretty much as soon as The Next Generation characters graduated to feature films, Paramount replaced them with Voyager as the flagship drama of their own TV network UPN. Voyager got all of the attention The Next Generation had, and to a large extent Deep Space Nine continued to run in the shadows. Paramount wanted the DS9 production team to do something with their fourth season to really grab viewers' attention and make a big impact on the ratings. Their strategy was this: turning Klingons back into the enemy of the Federation and bringing in popular Next Generation character Worf as a regular cast member. With a high-budget 90-minute season premiere, he makes a hell of an entrance.

The Pull List: 30 December 2015

Welcome to the final Pull List column for 2015 comics.

Another month, another Star Wars miniseries. I really like the way that Marvel is undertaking their line of Star Wars comics. As a huge and resurgent property the temptation must be there to simply flood the market with a dozen ongoing series and bleed the concept until the audiences moves on. Instead they've restricted themselves to three ongoing series - one of which is just wrapping up - and a successive line of five-issue miniseries.

The miniseries concept works beautifully for Star Wars, enabling top-flight talent to drop in, tell an entertaining story based around one of the key characters, and then have the whole arc published a month or two down the track as a graphic novel. The miniseries kicked off with Princess Leia, then Lando, Chewbacca ended this past week, and at the same time Marvel have launched the fourth series: Obi-Wan & Anakin.

It takes place between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, with Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi training and guiding the aggressive and ambitious teenager Anakin Skywalker. Their mission has sent them crashing onto a distant and mysterious planet, while flashbacks reveal the growing concerns the Jedi Council have over Anakin's progression towards becoming a Jedi. Charles Soule's script slots in well into the prequel era - albeit with much better dialogue - while Marco Checchetto's manga-esque artwork provides a very attractive take on these familiar characters. It looks like Marvel may be onto another hit. (4/5)

Marvel. Written by Charles Soule. Art by Marco Checchetto. Colours by Andres Mossa.

Under the cut: reviews of Batman and Robin Eternal, Chewbacca, Rat Queens and Ringside.