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

In theatres:

- Last Breath (2025): This based-on-actual-events undersea thriller has some good names attached to it, but it is not an actor's showcase, but rather a gripping slice of reality when commercial divers working on an undersea natural gas pipeline have things go terribly wrong. Woody Harrelson ("Cheers") and Simi Liu ("Kim's Convenience") are Duncan Alcock and Dave Yuasa respectively, working on a North Sea project that requires days of both compression and decompression, to allow them to work at depths that are just scary. When Chris Lemons, their co-worker (Finn Cole) gets caught up in a serious incident at a depth of more than 100 meters, this film, based on the 2017 documentary of the same name, takes a very grave and frightening turn. Dave and Chris are on the seafloor, unaware that above them, the ship that does all the work with their undersea diving bell, keeping them focused on task, is in trouble in exceedingly rough seas, with the computers that manage the ballast offline, causing the entire operation to falter as the ship is pulled off course leaving the two divers deep below the surface

On Netflix:

- Zero Day (Mini-Series) (2025): This political and cyberattack thriller has an exceptional cast, it has excellent talent in its writing and direction, and it is the most Baskin-Robbins-like series of its nature that I have ever seen. The Baskin-Robbins reference is my standard approach to movies and television where audiences are dramatically divided. The reason Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavours is because everyone likes something different. For every fan of Rocky Road, there is a purist who prefers plain vanilla. That's the case here, as Robert De Niro leads a strong cast dealing with what we learn very quickly is a series of cyber-attacks on the United States that are crippling everything from the banking system to airline traffic. De Niro is George Mullin, a much-loved former American President who is recruited by the current administration to investigate the attacks on infrastructure that are devastating at every turn. Also in the cast are Connie Britten ("Friday Night Lights," "Nashville"), Angela Bassett who plays the current U.S. President, Jesse Plemons ("Killers of the Flower Moon") and Joan Allen ("The Bourne Legacy") as former President Mullen's wife

- Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval (2024): It has been almost three years since Ellen's top-rated daytime talk show left the airwaves after 19 very successful seasons, and the story-behind-the-story has been slowly leaking out over the subsequent months and years like air out of an air mattress. It was during her final season that issues began to surface, suggesting that the environment on the show among the many employees was viewed as "toxic," that Ellen was a mean-spirited boss, and that a change was needed. From that came her decision to walk away from what was a huge money-maker for the studio, Warner Bros, and for the sponsors. In this one-hour-plus standup comedy set in front of a large audience, Ellen mixes some of her signature humour along with a surprisingly candid number of comments about her departure from the show that bore her name. She is quite specific in that her departure was not voluntary - she didn't jump, she was pushed - and that being a gay person had a lot to do with that, although it was wrapped up in the story of the toxic work environment rather than being out there as the real reason