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

In theatres:

- A Minecraft Movie (2025): For starters, full disclosure here, I am in no way,

shape, or form, a gamer.  I think the last, and the first, video game I

played was Space Invaders sometime in the 1980s, so the Minecraft movie looked

like one of those that I am required to see in order to fulfill my role as a

movie reviewer, but it did not look like something I would embrace or

understand.  Having seen the film, which stars Jack Black and Jason Mamoa,

I still don't really have a good handle on the Minecraft game, but I can

certainly say that it was an enjoyable experience, and that it was truly

nothing like I have ever seen before.  In its simplest terms, the

Minecraft game has its players mine for certain minerals, such as diamonds or

gold, and then craft them into items to help them pursue the bad guys in any

one of the infinite numbers of Minecraft worlds.  The story here focuses

on a boy named Henry (Sebastian Hansen) who looks to be about age 12, and his

older sister Natalie (Emma Meyers)

On Paramount+

.

- Happy Face (2025):  This limited series is less than halfway through its run

which ends in early May, has a lot of local threads and it is an excellent

binge-watch for true-crime aficionados.  It's the story of Chilliwack born

Keith Hunter Jesperson, who may have murdered as many as 160 people, mostly

women, many transients and sex workers.  After failing in his attempt to

join the RCMP, he took a job as a trucker working out of Cheney, WA, and

determined in very little time that this occupation was a perfect cover for his

criminal activities, and one that provided an almost endless supply of

potential victims.  This series, which was at one time a 2014 made-for-TV

movie, is the result of Jesperson's daughter's work.  Her real name

is Melissa Moore, played here by Annaleigh Ashford (from the recent TV sitcom

"B Positive").  She wrote a book on her father's criminal

activities and murders called "Shattered Silence," a 2009

autobiography which a few years later became a very successful podcast 

On Apple TV+

- Paradise (2025):  This eight-part series, now complete and ready for

binge-watching, is an exceptional tale very well-told.  Created by Dan

Fogelman, the writer/producer responsible for the Emmy-winning series

"This Is Us" (2016 - 2022) which followed the ups and downs of the

Pearson family throughout its beginnings to its endings, uses many of those

concepts in this thriller.  Fogelman also borrows the talents of Stirling

K. Brown to play his lead character in "Paradise" - Brown having

played Randall Pearson on "This Is Us."  Here, he plays Xavier

Collins, a secret service agent attached to the President of the United

States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden). It requires a lot of care to talk about

this series, and not let any cats out of any bags, as it would be easy to emit

a spoiler or two unwittingly.  We can tell in the early going that the

relationship between Collins and President Bradford is strained.  We don't

know why that is, and neither does the President.  Clearly, something

happened between the two men to change their trust in one another and their

relationship permanently