Reviews

It’s rare for me to be taken aback by a film but Nocturnal Animals not only surprised me but really got under my skin. Expecting a formulaic thriller, I found a harrowing, stylish and thematically rich drama. It bears saying ...

The best science fiction is philosophical and thought provoking. I don’t mean to suggest that good science fiction has to be as mind-numbingly slow and boring as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but really good scifi is rarely just explosions and ...

This is one of the most interestingly garbled films I have seen in some time. Trailers for The Accountant projected it as a sort of David Fincher-esque paranoid financial thriller with an withdrawn obsessive as its lead. In fact, this ...

Penned by the late David Bowie and playwright Enda Walsh, Lazarus is about as weird and nonsensical as you would imagine. I had done no research into the play before seeing it and avoided all reviews to the point that ...

The quintessential American experience: an fanatical cult obsessed with money and celebrity, fighting scrutiny at all costs, and weathering widespread claims of abusing and exploiting its members. It’s surprising Scientology is not the state religion. Let’s hope that opening crack ...

Peter McLean’s first Burned Man novel, Drake, was my idea of the perfect holiday read. It was fun, easy to read, and just a bit unsavoury. A while ago, I read somewhere that people who swear a lot are generally considered ...

Queen of Katwe falls well within the genre of a certain kind of sports film, telling as it does the story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. Comparisons could readily be made to Cool Runnings, also a Disney film about ...

There is a temptation to be dismissive of mainstream blockbusters. In truth, there is no merit in dismissing a film purely because it is part of a seemingly endless glut of studio products. It can have qualities whether it is ...

The 80’s are in. Nostalgia has made cassette tapes, mullets, and neon hair ties positively fashionable. Brian K. Vaughan has lucked out with the timing of Paper Girls; with Netflix’s Stranger Things and the next Black Mirror season also being set in the 1980s, the comics’ setting ...

Movies about self-centred, materialistic, vacuous dolts run a fine line. I’ve never been one to advocate that the subjects of films need to conventionally sympathetic but without some sort of critical observation of such figures, a filmmaker runs the risk ...