(courtesy IMP Awards) You could be forgiven for wondering if life has any redeeming features at all in master stopmotion animator Adam Elliot’s lates feature-length triumph, Memoir of a Snail. That’s not because the writer-producer-director is some kind of irredeemable pessimist; he is in fact wonderfully optimistic in the face Continue Reading
Book review: The Book Swap By Tessa Bickers
(courtesy Hachette Australia) We are in love with the road to love being quick, instant and one hundred percent assured. That’s why most romantic comedies strike a chord with us because they say you can have love, it will be immediately recognisable and there will be no guesswork at all Continue Reading
“You’re in my seat” Shrinking debuts season 2 trailer + poster
(courtesy TVPlusUpdates X aka Twitter account (c) AppleTV+) SNAPSHOTShrinking follows a grieving therapist (played by Segel) who starts to break the rules and tell his clients exactly what he thinks. Ignoring his training and ethics, he makes huge, tumultuous changes to people’s lives … including his own. In addition to Continue Reading
Mini-mass of movie trailers: Gladiator II, Thunderbolts* + Red One
(via Shutterstock) The year might be winding down – yes, already already! – but there are still plenty of great movies to see. Plus, of course, 2025 beckons and with it cinematic delights, or possible ones anyway, which we’ll get to after a brief break over the Christmas holidays to Continue Reading
Book review: Saltblood by Francesca De Tores
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) The art of reinvention is one many of us practice throughout our lives but it is likely that few have undertaken quite so radical and life transformative a change as that of Mary Read, a real 17th century women who began life raised as a boy after Continue Reading
Come together, differences and all: Thoughts on Centaurworld (season 2)
The trick with any show that is premised on an out-there idea and some pretty bonkers (thought delightfully) world-building, is that it needs to have a reason for being beyond simply being a whole of highly enjoyable, super colourful surreality. While it’s fun to watch a show which is all Continue Reading
Movie review: The Wild Robot
(courtesy IMP Awards) Underestimate the power of animation to tell a profoundly moving and important story at your peril. As The Wild Robot, based on the book of the same name by Peter Brown, underscores again and again during its perfectly judged 102-minute running time, animated features can move the Continue Reading
Book review: Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia) Is it possible for a story to be both crushingly hopeless and full of hope all at the same time? They may seem to be diametrically opposed states, but as many of us know, it is possible to feel as if life is slipping through Continue Reading
Comedy double: Frasier (S2, E1-2) and Bad Monkey (S1, E5-7) reviews
(courtesy IMP Awards) Frasier S2: E1-2 “Ham” and Cyrano, Cyrano” A Meta-based featurette on season two of the Frasier revival, often called Frasier (2023), promises, with the excitable sense of hype for which this type of promo is known, that the show’s second season shows the characters settling into themselves Continue Reading
Book review: Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili
(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) The phrase, “You can never go home again”, lifted from the title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe, is oft cited as proof that the past is somewhere so heavily coloured by nostalgia that viewing in anything like objective terms is all but impossible. That’s, on Continue Reading