Guest: Rick Forchuk - TV Week Magazine Columnist and CKNW Contributor

In theatres:

- Love Hurts (2025): The real story about this action-adventure-comedy is in its star, Ke Huy Quan who, as a young boy, was featured in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom," in 1984, followed by small parts in such films as "The Goonies," and in the TV series "Head of the Class" in 1990. Born in Vietnam of Chinese parents, Quan left acting in his early teens because of lack of opportunity. He pursued the movie business as a stunt coordinator and assistant producers, and didn't surface again until two years ago when he was nominated for, and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for "Everything Everywhere All at Once." Here in this film set in Milwaukee but filmed in Winnipeg, he is a successful realtor named Marvin Gable who has a past that he would like to forget. His brother, a high-end gangster, used to employ Marvin as an arm-and-leg man and sometime assassin, but Marvin turned his back on that life and on the woman he loved, Rose, played by Ariana DeBose ("West Side Story"). It all comes back to haunt him as his brother finds him and now has a hit out because Marvin failed to murder Rose, part of a bargain .... so it's all hitmen and wild action with not much story to get in the way

- Heart Eyes (2025): This is a real genre-bender - it is an R-rated horror-based romantic comedy wrapped up in a murder mystery, and if it were not so funny in spots, it would be tragic, but the deft hand of director Josh Ruben whose filmography is very sparse, and the clever writing of both Philip Murphy (the "Scream" movies) and Christopher Landon (son of the late Michael Landon of "Bonanza," "Little House on the Prairie," and "Highway to Heaven" fame leave the audience on edge not knowing if the next revelation will be something funny, or something absolutely horrific. It's Valentine's Day and a serial killer is at work carving up loving couples in the most gruesome ways imaginable. The murderer is now on his or her third consecutive Valentine's Day and the movie begins with an attack on a couple getting engaged - the young man is hit through the head with a crossbow bolt, while the young woman hides out in an innocent looking piece of machinary in the vineyard where the engagement was happening, and is dispatched in hideous fashion as her head literally explodes

On Paramount+:

- Dexter: Original Sin (Mini-Series) (2024): It was 2006 when actor Michael C. Hall first appeared as the title character, a blood spatter expert with the Miami Police, and as the cold serial killer with a difference. As Dexter Morgan, we learned of his need to inflict terminal pain upon people, but the twist to the story was that the people had to deserve it. Dexter's M.O. was to follow his prey, establish the fact, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the individual was an evil person who deserved to die, and then do the deed, usually rendering them unconscious, wrapping them in plastic sheeting in a remote location, and then extracting his revenge slowly and deliberately. His late father, Harry Morgan (James Remar) appeared in many episodes as a sort of conscience for Dexter, and we learned over time that Dexter's predilection for murder may have been an inherited trait. Over the seven seasons that the series existed, we saw Dexter repeatedly come close to being found out, and we also saw him mistakenly dispatch an innocent person