June 29, 2025 – SparklyPrettyBriiiight

(courtesy IMP Awards) OOOO OOOO OOOO

Songs, songs and more songs #124: GRANT KNOCHE, MO, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Lil Nas X + Miley Cyrus

(via Shutterstock) Life is a LOT. And while there’s no escaping that, you can find ways to work through the myriad of emotions that summons, including of course channeling it into some highly cathartic music. These five artists do that brilliantly and well and the resultant songs manage to get Continue Reading

Book review: Salvage by Jennifer Mills

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) What would happen if the world “ended” in slow motion? In other words, rather than the big bang and boom of the usual fall of civilisation that we have seen documented in all kinds of apocalyptic storytelling, what if the cataclysmic hell of the end of Continue Reading

Movie review: Flow

(courtesy IMP Awards) It’s a rare thing indeed to emerge from watching a movie of any kind and feel both soothed and euphoric. Surely the two states are antithetical, with the more active one bludgeoning the other into emotional oblivion with boundlessly energetic vivacity? Or the former chilling you the Continue Reading

Breaking free: How Jim Henson and his team made the Muppets magic happen

(courtesy Muppet Wiki / (c) The Jim Henson Company / Disney) SNAPSHOTThe illusions that have baffled me for years is when muppets go outside when they seem to break free from their puppeteers and become little sentient creatures….These movies were released before CGI was ubiquitous. These are in-camera effects. What Continue Reading

Book review: The Emilie Adventures by Martha Wells

(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) Growing up should be a time of limitless optimism and possibility, a temporal place where imagination runs riot, adventure is the order of the day and all the burdens of the world don’t fall upon your still small shoulders. But sometimes, all those good and wonderful Continue Reading

Want to borrow some nostalgia? Head on over to Video Heaven

(courtesy First Showing) SNAPSHOTFor some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture – and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years Continue Reading

Comic strip review: Sunday Funday Wallace by Will Henry

(courtesy Simon & Schuster) SNAPSHOTA visual celebration of one of the most dynamic and imaginative comics since Calvin and Hobbes, this deluxe hardcover treasury celebrates includes every Wallace the Brave Sunday comic strip from 2018-2024, featuring original watercolors, character art, maps, and an introduction by the author. This book celebrates Continue Reading

Book review: In the Key of Dale by Benjamin Lefebvre

(courtesy Arsenal Pulp Press) For some people, working out where they fit in life in easy – one look and they know where it is and who they fit in with and they glide seamlessly into place with balletic ease. But others, and I suspect it’s the majority of people, Continue Reading

Is love all a bit Too Much? Discover the pent-up rage and dark secrets in the first trailer

(courtesy First Showing (c) Netflix) SNAPSHOTJessica (Megan Stalter) is a New York workaholic in her mid-thirties, reeling from a broken relationship that she thought would last forever and slowly isolating everyone she knows. When every last block in New York City tells a story of her own bad behaviour, the Continue Reading

Finishing up a season … and starting the next: Review of Poker Face S1 E6-10 + S2: E1-6

(courtesy IMP Awards) Season 2, E 1-5 review One of Poker Face‘s great strengths in its first season was that even thought it never trivialised murder, which was always seen as an evil act in need of some form or redemptive justice – handed out, of course, by protagonist Charlie Continue Reading