April 5, 2025 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

(courtesy IMP Awards) There are always stories behind the stories – if you care to look for them, of course. Which is precisely what Pixar’s first TV/streaming series, Win or Lose, with the studio’s customary blend of whimsy and hard-hitting, heartfelt humanity. Set in a small U.S. community on the Continue Reading

Look out for it: Thoughts on Pixar’s Win or Lose

Road to Eurovision 2025: Week 2 – Estonia, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway + Poland (semi-final 1, part 2)

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 Bookshop Detectives #2: Tea and Cake and Death by Gareth Ward and Louise Ward

(courtesy Penguin Books Australia) Cosy crime has become quite the thing in recent years, and while those unacquainted with the genre might wonder how something so awful could be considered in the same vein as warm fires, knitting and supportive found families, there’s something about combining cosiness and crime that Continue Reading

Movie review: The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

(courtesy IMP Awards) Nostalgia, handled carefully, can be a wonderful thing. You can relive and renew your love for something that gave you, and likely still gives you, great joy, and as long as it doesn’t ensnare and entrap you from adding to your living library of life experiences, you Continue Reading

Stranger and stranger indeed: The entertaining trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3

(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTIn Season 3, when we reconnect with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, still under the command of Captain Pike, they face the conclusion of Season 2’s harrowing encounter with the Gorn. But new life and civilizations await, including a villain that will test our characters’ grit Continue Reading

Graphic novel review: Snapdragon by Kat Leyh

(courtesy Macmillan Publishers) It’s a sad fact of life that far too many people only seem comfortable in themselves when they’re adhering to a rigid set of social values in which there are two possibilities – you satisfy the often cruel requirements laid down by god-knows-who and are accepted, or Continue Reading

Book review: Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley

(courtesy Hachette Australia) If you were a cinemagoer in the ’80s and ’90s, when big budget action blockbusters were at their inarguable height, you would well acquainted with what it’s like for innocent people to get caught up in a situation far bigger than themselves. These are usually not the Continue Reading

AFFFF25 movie review: Meet the Leroys (Nous, les Leroy)

(courtesy IMDb) The end of something is always bittersweet. Even the final moments of something awful comes with a sense of mourning for what otherwise might have been; but when it’s something like a marriage between two people who were once genuinely in love, that sense of loss and grief Continue Reading

Road to Eurovision 2025: Week 1 – Albania, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Croatia + Cyprus (semi-final 1, part 1)

Book review: Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods

(courtesy Harper Collins Australia) It has oft been noted that there is nothing new under the sun, and while the Bible got the ball rolling on that one, plenty of others have taken up the cry that try as we might to be creatively original or to dream up a Continue Reading