It’s the time of year when serious Oscar contenders swamp our screens. But sometimes it’s good just to sit back, disengage your brain and indulge in something silly. For that, there’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This is a faux-sequel to 1995’s Jumanji, a film perhaps nostalgically remembered as better than it actually was. The nostalgia…
Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 30 June 2023. Dream From The Deep Well is the new album from celebrated Irish singer songwriter Brigid Mae Power. Recognised as a purveyor of dreamier pop with folky leanings, this new album is a departure; a unique marriage…
It’s one of history’s great rivalries. The intriguing story of Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Stuart certainly has all the elements of a great movie – war, intrigue, family ties and treachery. But while Josie Rourke’s feminist retelling of the tale in Mary Queen of Scots hits the high points, it strays from the…
Kriv Stenders’ Red Dog was a feelgood film that captivated Australian audiences way back in 2011. It was a genuine crowd-pleaser and a tear-jerker and also one of the highest grossing films of the year. It proved so popular that are sequel was probably inevitable given how the industry works. But is has taken five…
Mateo Askaripour’s debut Black Buck is a fast paced and always self-aware skewering of capitalism as a mechanism for both reinforcing racism and being part of the solution. Askaripour takes readers into the heart of the capitalist dream machine – disruptive start-ups selling dreams to the world – and finds it as repressive and unreconstructed…
All things considered, 2017 was a pretty good year for movies. Not for Hollywood itself mind you. The scandals that plagued Tinseltown have been well covered elsewhere, so we’re not going to get into them here. But the consensus seems to be that the quality of movies this year was a cut above. By the…
It’s been a few years since I’ve read the Millennium series (and watched the Swedish film versions), but having enjoyed them, I was keen to see how a new writer would tackle the series. It’s big shoes to fill, but David Lagercrantz stepped into those shoes with style and clever storytelling. Here’s the blurb: The…
Relatively Speaking, by Alan Ayckbourn, was his first big commercial hit, in1967. It had a cast that included Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson and introduced Richard Briers to the London West End. The play, originally called Meeting My Father, came out of the ‘revolutionary’ era of the English Swinging Sixties with all its entertainment taboo explorations…
Big Brother is watching your every move and is judging you … harshly – very harshly indeed. In the case of Int, Big Brother is a “she” and she appears to have a firm grip on you; at least initially. That is what I took away from this 50-minute, one woman performance art piece – a polished…
Rare is the artist who does their best work when they are on top of the world, when all is going well, and they are happy and fulfilled. Sufjan Stevens has explored a wide and disparate subject matter, from the folky Psalm-like spirituality of Seven Swans, the unique geographic and diverse cultural expressions of Illinois,…
