Gael Garcia Bernal and Alice Braga are both substantial screen presences in big Hollywood movies for quite some time now. Braga has been in big films like I Am Legend, Predators, and Elysium, while Bernal has been in a long string of interesting projects too long to mention, so I'll single out two by Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel and Amores Perros. They also co-starred previously in Blindness. Ardor is a much lower-profile movie. It seems like a passion project for Bernal, who is a producer on the project that is meant to be socially conscious and appeal to the South American market. It was filmed in the Argentinian rain forest and is trying to be a modern day western.

Ardor (The Burning) is very much like an old-fashioned western. It is a simple film about tobacco farmers in the wilderness trying to survive the rugged terrain. The complication is that roving bands of men come and slaughter and burn people off their farms in the area. Bernal plays a mysterious stranger who comes out of the forest to aid Braga as her father is butchered by the men. The movie moves with a hypnotic slow pace as Bernal and Braga manage to escape and hide together in the forest. The scenery is monochromatic and uniform, so it is hard to tell where they are. It seems they don't stray far from the sparse farm buildings which we see from time to time. The dynamic between the two hiding in the woods and the greater number of men hunting them does change for long periods of time. It allows the two to bond in the rainforest. Braga does take an opportunity provide a brief sex scene in the rain. It is all very sweaty and rainy. At some points we see a leopard lurking about, which appears to be a spirit animal of Bernal's.

The most cynical people in the world are Madison Avenue advertising executives. There are probably some other types that would be in the running, but I think they would probably concede I'm right. Thom Payne (Steve Coogan) is a modern-day ad exec who immediately takes shots at the show Mad Men in his frequent narrations. That's not the only thing he and his wife Lee (Kathryn Hahn) curse out in the profanity-laced Showtime series, Happyish. This show is famous or infamous for being the last project that Phillip Seymour Hoffman worked on before he overdosed (but he did complete a pilot episode). Coogan was eventually brought in to replace Hoffman after much hand-wringing and second-guessing. They are pretty dissimilar actors. Hoffman was full of vulnerability and an unpredictable intelligence. I'd love to see the pilot Hoffman filmed, but it has not been made available as yet. It definitely changes the dynamic of the show. Coogan doesn't have the same gravitas, or warmth for that matter. Coogan tends to give off an arrogant and superior vibe. That changes everything.

Happyish, in general, also gives off a totally different feel than the multiple award winner, Mad Men. They take place in different universes. Mad Men is an epic look at the history of one agency over the years. Happyish is a present day satiric attack on just about everything in the culture. Satire can be a rough thing to pull off. Show creator Shalom Auslander was in advertising, and he is aggressive in his attacks on just about anything that comes to mind. When his barbs hit, they hit dead on, and when they miss, they miss by a mile. It is definitely hit or miss. Some of the more successful satire is on actual products and animated company representatives like the Keebler elves and the Geico gecko; both are brought on to spout unconventional bon mots. Coca-Cola, New York Life, the United States Armed Forces, and J.P. Morgan are some of the other real-life targets of other jokes. At one point, Rob Reiner is brought in to direct a commercial using real-life little people to replace the animated Keebler elves. Some of the other guest stars in the 10-episode run are Ellen Barkin as a corporate headhunter, Carrie Preston (True Blood) as a nervous account executive, Bradley Whitford (The West Wing) as the agency head, Richard Kind as Moses, James Deen as a porno actor philosopher, and even Hitler makes a cameo as the somewhat displeased director of a Coke commercial. Coogan is the creative director who has to deal with two 25-year-old Swedes, Gottfrid and Gustaf, who are very social-media-conscious.

Remember when you were a kid and one of your friends would come over and ask if you could come out and play? You would head for the door with a grin from ear to ear, because you knew you were about to have a blast. You might not have had any idea what it was you were going to do. Often you made it up as you went along. It didn't matter. You just knew fun times were on the other side of your front door. That's exactly how I felt going to catch The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. It was as if Joss Whedon had come to my house and asked me to come out and play. And it wasn't just Joss. He brought a whole bunch of his cool friends, and they brought a ton of really cool toys. From that point it didn't matter so much to me what was going to happen exactly. Phasers were set to good times, and I knew I was going to have fun. Age Of Ultron did it to me just like the many Marvel films before it. I didn't want it to end. I often joke that the only thing wrong with instant gratification is that it takes too long. Now I have to wait another year before most of these characters will assemble once again in Captain America: Civil War.

The film opens with the action already flying. This time there's no time spent "getting the band back together". The Avengers are in a snowy forest where they are attacking a Hydra base. It is here that they first encounter two new enhanced humans (it is verboten to use the term mutant because of Marvel's deal with Fox). Wanda (Olsen) and Pietro  (Taylor-Johnson) Maximoff are working for Hydra because they blame Tony Stark (Downey, Jr.) for the death of their parents and the destruction of their village. Pietro has super speed and is known in the comics world as Quicksilver. Wanda has crazy psychic and telekinetic powers and is known as The Scarlet Witch. She gets into Tony's head and brings him a horrible vision of a tragic future.

"Life's short and then you die. And then... then you have make some decisions. You can skulk around, lamenting all that you've lost, trying to keep yourself numb and isolated. Or you can embrace who you are."

For years I've been hearing about how "hot" vampires were on television and in the movies. It all appeared to start with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it actually goes back a lot longer ago. Zombies, on the other hand were the sole property of feature films, usually extreme low-budget affairs. AMC's The Walking Dead has changed all of that. Suddenly zombies are very hot and populating one of the highest rated shows on television. Add a spin-off, and the domination continues. It wasn't going to take long for someone else to join the field. Enter iZombie, and we're off and running.