SNAPSHOTLights up on Washington Heights… The scent of a cafecito caliente hangs in the air just outside of the 181st Street subway stop, where a kaleidoscope of dreams rallies this vibrant and tight-knit community. At the intersection of it all is the likable, magnetic bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), who Continue Reading
Book review: Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams) by Anita Heiss
One of the enduring deficits of our modern age is the inability of people to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and appreciate life from their perspective, a great irony considering the supposed hyperconnectivity of the digital era. This lack of empathy is nothing new, of course, having bedevilled humanity Continue Reading
Road to Eurovision 2021: Week 6 – San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine
What is the Eurovision Song Contest?Started way back in 1956 as a way of drawing a fractured Europe back together with the healing power of music, the Eurovision Song Contest, or Concours Eurovision de la Chanson – the contest is telecast in both English and French – is open to Continue Reading
Book review: The Rose Daughter by Maria Lewis
Having the weight of destiny sitting heavily upon your shoulders is not easy for anyone. But it’s particularly onerous for Dreckly Jones, the protagonist of The Rose Daughter by Maria Lewis, a woman of supernatural origins – her father was an earth elemental and her mother a selkie – who Continue Reading
Tons o’ trailers! Wish Dragon, Misfits, Georgetown, Loki, Stranger Things S4, A Quiet Place II (final trailer)
These are troubling times we live in which means that reality is, most days, something not many of us really want to face. Thank goodness then for TV and streaming shows and movies, all of which give us the sweet, SWEET chance to let lose the bonds of grinding humdrum Continue Reading
Fear the Walking Dead: “Handle With Care” / “The Holding” (S6, E10 & E11 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … STOLEN GUNS AND WACKO CULTISTS …SO BUSINESS AS USUAL THEN? It is a rare thing indeed for any TV show to excite you with its writing so much that you punch the air and almost leap out of the chair with the pleasure of watching a finely-honed Continue Reading
Movie review: Land
A haunting, deeply affecting painful, and yet hopeful beauty suffuses every last meditative moment of Land, a film that tackles the often misunderstood issue of grief in ways both nuanced and confronting. Directed by Robin Wright, Land tells the story of Edee (played by Wright), a woman so consumed by Continue Reading
Book review: Falling by T. J. Newman
ARC courtesy NetGalley – release date 2 June 2021 in Australia. There is a certain familiarity that comes with airline hijacking narratives. Naturally, there is always a sense of mounting tension as innocent parties embark on what they think will be a trouble-free journey only to discover that their flight Continue Reading
Retro movie review: The Empire Strikes Back #StarWars #MayThe4thBeWithYou
Pity the sequel to a blockbuster first film. Like the second sibling in a family where the eldest born cured cancer, fed the world’s poor and made successful and beneficial contact with aliens, all before the age of five, a sequel to a massively successful movie has an almost crushing Continue Reading
Book review – The Empire Strikes Back: From a Certain Point of View by various authors #MayThe4thBeWithYou
The first three movies released in what has now been christened either the Star Wars Saga or The Skywalker Saga – these are now, of course, episodes four through six – are so imaginatively and expansively created that it is hard to imagine how you could possibly add anything further Continue Reading