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Don’t Believe the Hype

At the end of last week, I reviewed Marvel’s latest movie Black Panther. The film has, quite rightly, received a lot of attention for its focus on black African characters. Speaking as a white guy, it is all too easy ...

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Netflix: Just another network

Netflix

It was an exciting time when Netflix began commissioning original television and films. They didn’t need to please advertisers, just their subscribers. They could take more risks (we assumed), show us something the networks would never dare to. And at ...

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Genre Fiction and the Middlebrow

Literary fiction awards rarely go to works of science fiction and fantasy. We review a lot of genre fiction on Pop-Verse. Mainly science fiction and fantasy. These books might be lauded in their own fields but are, with some exception, ...

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Appreciating art without contextual bias

A Wrinkle in Time

When I was ten or so, my mother bought me the classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It sat on my shelf for twenty years. But with the film coming out in a few months, I decided it ...

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Psycho-biddies and hag horror

Feud: Bette and Joan

What did you do this Christmas? I binge-watched Ryan Murphy’s (of American Horror Story and Scream Queens fame) latest anthology series, Feud. The first series features the infamous Hollywood feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, picking up on the narrative for the development of ...

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Are we living in the Golden Age of TV?

Breaking Bad

We are told this is the golden age of television. That we live in a bold new world where high-powered dramas pursue long-form stories with feature film-like production qualities. It is a rather tiresome platitude. Aside from an obvious vanity ...

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