News

The BBC has revealed the next intake of seven assistant commissioners who will be joining the corporation’s commissioning teams across the U.K. The candidates will be joining a year-long placement with development opportunities.

The assistant commissioners are:

Gillian Burke – children’s 0-12 animated content, Northern Ireland. Burke previously worked as a line producer for Sixteen South Studios on seasons 2-7 of PBS Kids’ hit show, “Pinkalicious & Peterrific!” Other credits include the Emmy nominated “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” and Amazon Prime’s “The Bug Diaries.”

Mark Harrison – current affairs, Midlands and North of England. Harrison is a BAFTA and Rts-winning executive producer whose credits include “Paramedics On Scene” and “Scotland, Slavery and Statues” for the BBC and “Rescue: Extreme Medics” for Channel 4. He has experience working across documentary, current affairs, specialist factual and factual entertainment genres on programs including “Dispatches,” “Panorama” and “Watchdog.”

Sidra Khan – factual entertainment and events,...

Exclusive: First Run Features is promising “a robust awards campaign” for The Quiet Epidemic, after acquiring U.S. distribution rights to the documentary about Chronic Lyme and tick-borne disease.

The film directed by Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch will begin a one-week Oscar-qualifying run at the IFC Center in New York on December 2, followed by a nationwide rollout in early 2023.

According to CDC figures, almost half a million Americans become infected with Lyme disease each year. Of those infected, a subset of patients will develop chronic symptoms, but according to the film, the medical community has largely been reluctant to acknowledge the reality of long-term illness from Lyme disease.

“The Quiet Epidemic follows a young girl from Brooklyn and a Duke University scientist both diagnosed with a disease said to not exist: Chronic Lyme disease,” a summary of the film notes. “Their search for answers lands them in the middle of a vicious medical debate.

Captain Underpants is the family movie of the summer. Here's our review...

Unless you have fond memories of Dav Pilkey's series of books, it's entirely possible that Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie has tra-la-laaa'd its way into cinemas under your radar. Hopefully, you'll seek it out, because this is the funniest and most creative film to come out of DreamWorks Animation in a long time.

The imaginations fuelling the story are fourth-grade children George and Harold (voiced by Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch), who break up the monotony of their life at the unusually austere Jerome Horwitz Elementary School by drawing comics, playing pranks and generally trying to make each other laugh.

Their principal, Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms) hates them for it and on the brink of banishing them to separate classes, an unexpectedly powerful cereal box gift enables the boys to hypnotise him. He comes to believe...

George Lucas produces the Ilm animated fantasy, Strange Magic. Here's Mark's review of a curious genre mash-up...

Since George Lucas got out of the Star Wars business, he's been lending his Hollywood heft to some long-gestating passion projects that might be difficult to produce independently elsewhere. He started developing Red Tails, a war movie about the Tuskegee airmen, back in 1988 and eventually served as producer and an uncredited co-director on the 2012 movie.

Lucasfilm's latest, Strange Magic, is directed by Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom, but it's also been around for much longer than you'd think. 15 years ago, while working on that pesky prequel trilogy, Lucas started thinking about making a film for his daughters. “Just like Star Wars was designed for 12-year-old boys,” Lucas told Wired upon the film's Us release in January, “Strange Magic was designed for 12-year-old girls.”

If that sounds a little reminiscent of when John Travolta...

We asked Den Of Geek’s writers to recommend brilliant comedy shows that deserve to have more of a fuss made about them. Here they are...

Banging a drum about stuff we love is more or less our remit on Den Of Geek - hence what many readers have started referring to as the ‘inexplicably regular' appearance of Statham, squirrels and Harold Bishop from Neighbours on these pages.

To that end then, we asked our writers which comedy shows (past and present, UK or otherwise, on TV, radio, or online…) deserved more praise, and here are the ones they chose. You might already like them too, or you might discover something new to dig out and enjoy. That’s the fun of it.

Please note that this list isn’t ranked in any order, nor is it exhaustive. It’s compiled from the opinions of a group of different people,...

Mark counts down 15 great episodes of The Simpsons from its often-overlooked past 15 years...

Last week, we counted down our list of the top 50 episodes of The Simpsons ever made. It's a tough list to make, picking out less than 10 percent of the 552 episodes broadcast to date, to select the very best of the best. This is despite the off-hand consensus of some viewers that the series has been total rubbish since season 10.

We don't hold much truck with this assumption. The Simpsons is an institution and to suggest that more than half of it is garbage is more than a bit reductive. Admittedly, there's much to support the argument that few episodes produced in the twenty-first century can quite stand up to the genius of the earlier canon, but anything would suffer in comparison to that golden age of the show.

If you're one of the people who stopped watching the series after the nineties,...

Feature Mark Harrison 5 Mar 2014 - 06:39

For every animated movie that gets made, there are dozens more that never make it. Mark looks at some failed Disney projects...

In the age of the internet, Hollywood studios are much quicker to announce the projects they have in development than they used to be. Now that the demand is there, there's a huge turnover of movie-related news every day, and if you follow it in any significant way, there are probably a whole bunch of projects that you've heard about, maybe even gotten excited about, that never came to fruition.

Still, it's not only via the easier availability of such information that we know about projects that never came to be. At a studio like Disney, projects will get as far as being fully developed in animatic form before falling apart, and the artefacts left behind from such abridged projects have made for some fascinating reading.