If you’re a Christmasaholic, you may well wonder what zombies are doing shambling their way through your favourite holiday. After all, isn’t the song-evoked “most wonderful time of the year” a joyous time of peace and goodwill to all, chestnuts roasting over open fires and sleigh rides through the Continue Reading
Movies
On 1st day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 11 new pop culture ornaments
I am not a Christmas traditionalist. Well, I am and I am not, said as I pivot, rather precariously on the fence of what sounds dangerously like festive decorating ambivalence. What I mean is that while I love all the warm-and-fuzzy, bright-and-shiny trappings of the season so much so that Continue Reading
Christmas movie review: The Holiday Calendar
If you are to believe Hallmark, and frankly who are we to disagree, Christmas is the ideal time to fall in love. Movie after movie – 33 this year in total, up from last year’s Grinch-ly paltry 28 – extols the wonder and magic of a time of year Continue Reading
Mary Poppins Returns is almost here! Watch 73 questions with star Emily Blunt
I know Vogue’s 73 Questions series is simply part of a big publicity push for a film, an actor and yes, the magazine itself, but they are so much fun and done so very well, that I just can’t help loving them. For a start, while they make excellent Continue Reading
Christmas movie review: Babes in Toyland (1961)
At first glance, Babes in Toyland, Disney’s 1961 aspirational attempt to create a movie as magically transportive and musically-rich as The Wizard of Oz – they didn’t but that was a pretty tall order anyway – doesn’t come across as a Christmas film of any stripe. (The festive angle Continue Reading
Trauma and healing in Welcome to Marwen
SNAPSHOT Welcome to Marwen tells the miraculous true story of one broken man’s fight as he discovers how artistic imagination can restore the human spirit. When a devastating attack shatters Mark Hogancamp (Carell) and wipes away all memories, no one expected recovery. Putting together pieces from his old and Continue Reading
Movie review: Shoplifters
There are two ways to look at the close-knit family at the heart of writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s quietly-spoken but emotionally powerful Palme D’or winning film, Shoplifters. One, held by the police who eventually portray them as would-be murderers, scam artists and kidnappers, holds that they encapsulate everything that is wrong Continue Reading
Movie poster art: The whimsical colour and steely intent of Mary Poppins Returns
SNAPSHOT In Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns, an all new sequel with a fresh sensibility that celebrates the spirit of the original, Mary Poppins is back to help the next generation of the Banks family find the joy and wonder missing in their lives. Emily Blunt (The Girl on the Continue Reading
Film review: Boy Erased
For a species that has used endless ingenuity and creativity to scramble its way up the evolutionary pile, humanity can be hideously inflexible at times. There is something hardwired into the very fabric of Homo sapiens that lends itself to entrenched adherence to a set of beliefs, no matter Continue Reading
Surviving pageant season: Dumplin’ gloriously challenges the idea of who is beautiful and why
SNAPSHOT Directed by Anne Fletcher, DUMPLIN’ follows an outspoken plus-sized teenage girl named Willowdean (Danielle Macdonald), who’s known as Will to her friends and Dumplin’ to her mother (Jennifer Aniston), a former beauty queen who now runs the local Miss Teen Blue Bonnet pageant. In her small Texas town, Continue Reading