Reviews

Yorgos Lanthimos’ last feature The Lobster was one of the most original and memorable films of 2015. The director specialises in absurd tales of the sinister and blackly humorous. His latest film The Killing of a Sacred Deer is every ...

This book is terrible. I don’t usually like to lay it down quite as harshly as that (though some people tell me I’m far harsher than I realise), but Artemis is a truly awful novel. It contains culturally insensitive characterisation, poorly executed ...

We have had big revivals of Sherlock Holmes in recent years so now comes the inevitable big screen revival of another staple of detective fiction and Sunday evening TV murder mysteries: Hercule Poirot. This adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s ...

I had no idea what to expect with this one. I loved the cover and the blurb talked about AI – I was sold. The premise is very simple and I raced through the novel. When I reached the halfway ...

Success is a fickle beast. Everyone wants it – but what do you do when you get it? Living up to something so close to perfect as the first season of Stranger Things was never going to be easy. While the ...

After Thor: The Dark World, things could only get better. I’m glad that Marvel is opening up to slightly auteur directors like James Gunn and Taika Waititi, it has at least made for superhero films that aren’t all exactly the same. ...

Tchaikovsky really excels at finding interesting ways to comment on society through the use of animals in science fiction and fantasy settings. In his Echoes of the Fall series, each group is a different animal and exhibits particular social traits ...

Crime dramas always strike me as struggling on the big screen. It is undoubtedly an opinion arising from my upbringing, but a detective story is often well-suited to the serialised format of TV. The limited running time of a film ...

Censorship! State execution! Gulags! This is the stuff great comedy is made of. The Death of Stalin is an adaptation of a French graphic novel being brought to the screen by satirical maestro Armando Iannucci. The helmsman behind The Thick ...

I can’t remember where exactly it was that I stumbled across a recommendation for Selena Chambers’ debut collection of short stories, Calls for Submission. What I do remember, however, was how the collection was described as weird and offputting. Such a ...