February 14, 2025 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Not all romantic comedies (rom-coms) are created equal. Yes, they all share certain near-inviolable tropes and tick a certain set of boxes that guarantee love will win the day no matter what comes against it, but it’s the deployment of these expected elements that influences whether the Continue Reading

Book review: The Great When (A Long London novel) by Alan Moore

(courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing) Let’s be honest – when it’s not being sensationalist or downright scary (and there’s a lot of that right now courtesy of one very large North American country’s new ruler), the real world can be more a little boring. We get on trains when commuting, we get Continue Reading

Movie review: Captain America: Brave New World

(courtesy IMP Awards) Blockbuster movies are supposed to be big, bold and epic. That’s the whole point of them; to take us into some intensely escapist storytelling that consumes the screen, monopolises all our attention and so subsumes us in a world and a story not our own that we’re Continue Reading

Book review: The Antique Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C. L. Miller

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Quirky crime all too often gets a bad rap from “serious” crime afficionados. It’s often incorrectly viewed as Crime Lite, and while that might be the case with some of the less well-written members of the sub-genre, the reality is that masterfully written cosy crime, of Continue Reading

“That’s all folks!” The hilariously kaboomy fun of The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTIn The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck venture to the big screen as unlikely heroes and Earth’s only hope when their antics at a local bubble gum factory uncover a secret alien mind control plot. Faced with cosmic Continue Reading

Valentine’s Day rom-com review redux: While You Were Sleeping

(courtesy IMP Awards) This review was first published on 25 November 2025 Given they’re about love, longing and the good feelings that make life worth living, it’s easy to assume that romantic comedies aka rom-coms are full to the brim with real, actual emotionality, the kind that sears the soul, Continue Reading

Valentine’s Day book review: The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center

Upcoming movies double-bill: Picture This and The Penguin Lessons

(via Shutterstock) In news that will surprise no one, bar those who have never darkened a cinema or a pop culture reporting site, there are a lot of movies coming out all the time. Streaming. Cinema. Projected onto the sheet of a small shed in a small country town. Movies. Continue Reading

Book review: Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

(courtesy Hachette Australia) Reading Heather Fawcett’s lustrously beautifully, funny and charming series centred on dryadologist (someone who studies fairies) Emily Wilde is to be transported to a rich world which is lightly escapist and darkly foreboding all at once. Her previous novels in the series, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries Continue Reading

The new face of investigation: Thoughts on High Potential (S1, E1-4)

(courtesy IMP Awards) TV should be, in a perfect world, one of those leisure pursuit that doesn’t demand a lot of you. It is, after all, something that you do to escape the pressures of everyday living; but in recent years, with the rise of a wealth of brilliantly produced Continue Reading

Book review: The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer

(courtesy Text Publishing) We are defined and connected by stories. That may seem self-evident but it’s not until you drawn into a poetically rich novel like The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer that you come to understand, even just a little, how what we are told and Continue Reading