Christopher Nolan has never shied away from the audacious. From his breakthrough in Memento (2000) to the time-travel twists of Tenet (2020), he embraces the challenge of doing the impossible and making it seem easy. His most notable work to date – Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar – has been in the sci-fi arena….
Big Brother is watching in Upgrade, a futuristic horror-thriller from Leigh Whannell (Insidious: Chapter 3). Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) barely makes a living fixing old cars. His attractive wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) works in IT. The pair have a good relationship. All that changes though after Grey delivers a vehicle to Eron (Harrison Gilbertson). Eron is…
Talk about getting yourself into a pickle. In the decidedly quirky An American Pickle, Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) certainly does in more ways than one. It is 1919 and Herschel is digging ditches for a living in Eastern Europe in a fictional place called Schlupsk. When he sets eyes upon Sarah (Sarah Snook) it’s love…
First, a confession. I don’t believe I’ve seen any of the films in the Saw franchise before Jigsaw, the eighth in the series. The seventh, Saw 3D, came out in 2010. To date, the Saw films have grossed $874 million worldwide. And they’ve created one of the most influential horror villains of all time. The films follow…
Consensual is a play by British writer, Evan Placey. Mr Placey has written most of his plays with young audiences in mind. Consensual was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre Rep Company. It deals with sex and the classroom. It, like the 2006 film with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal, deals…
Science fiction and fantasy writer Lavie Tidhar turns to the very real history of Israel in his latest novel, Maror. This is not the first time Tidhar has used Israel as a setting for his work. But his award-winning Central Station is set around a Tel Aviv spaceport, and the multiversal Unholy Land imagines a…
Edward Ashton burst onto the science fiction scene with his ‘cloning meets first contact meets colonisation’ tale Mickey 7 (now the long-delayed movie Mickey 17 directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Robert Pattinson). Mickey 7 was followed up by a less successful sequel Antimatter Blues. For his third book, Ashton does something different although…
Carrying shades of Sicario and Payback, Mel Gibson returns to the big screen in the action-thriller Blood Father as Link, an ex-con who has done all manner of bad things, but is now wanting to turn his life around. With an ex-wife who doesn’t want to talk to him and a daughter he’s lost touch…
It is difficult to read of women’s lives being micromanaged by their domestic captors to the point of scheduled toilet breaks, and of young children being raised entirely behind closed doors. These are hard novels to take on. If you are reading this because you have heard Dear Child compared to ‘The Room’, you will…
Lyrical prose and rich description sets apart Naked: A Novel of Lady Godiva as an historical novel of note. Eliza Redgold’s distinctive writing style paints a stunning portrait of Lady Godiva, a woman who rose above the challenges and restrictions of her time to defend her people and land. As the blurb says, “We know her…
