Tag Archives: Review

It occurred to me as I was leaving the cinema, what a sorry state the buddy movie has been in these last few years. Trying to remember some gems, I had to think back a good many years to come ...

I have been hearing nothing but praise for the former editor in chief of io9, Charlie Jane Anders, and her novel All the Birds in the Sky. While I’ve previously been burned by hype, this little gem lived up to its ...

Sigh… Okay, our third major comic book blockbuster has landed for the year. Let’s get this over with. I am going to confess that this superhero franchise is the one I hold in the most affection. Whether it be through ...

Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak? First published in 2011, A Monster Calls was a figment of Siobhan Dowd’s imagination before her death. Her editor at Walker Books, ...

Ah, the coming of age drama. Such a staple and yet so often botched. Do it well and you can tell a tale of universal appeal. Do it poorly and your film will surely be a hive of insipid sentimentalism ...

Green Room is not my usual kind of film. When I do watch horror, I tend to prefer films with a more supernatural element – staying well within the realms of ‘scary’ but further away from reality. The third feature ...

There is sensitive subject matter and then there is sensitive subject matter. Son of Saul depicts the Holocaust. The plot follows Saul Auslӓnder, a Hungarian Jew and Sonderkommando – a death camp prisoner put to work in the camp. The ...

This film had arguably the easiest act to follow after the utter crap-pile that was Batman vs Superman. Critics and fans alike were crying out for a better superhero film to wash away the bad aftertaste. And, thankfully, Civil War ...

Leviathan’s Blood is the second novel in the Children Trilogy from Ben Peek. With the first novel in the series setting out a complex and original world, Peek had his work cut out for him to keep up the quality ...

The musician biopic has sadly become a staid and generic entity. Since Walk the Line, the format has been refined to a soulless template, mapping out predictable plot points to be applied tritely at well-edited points in the musician’s life. ...