There’s something enormously energising about watching a thoroughly in-love-with-life musical. For a few brief hours, you are taken from a world in which disappointments are legion, pain is manifest and hope, joy and justice must fight for limited space, into one where things may look bleak for a time but Continue Reading
Movies
A ton of tantalising streaming trailers: Foundation (S2), That ’90s Show, The Ark, Poker Face, Night Court and The Last of Us
Another year, another slew of TV/streaming options to dazzle, entertain and yes, overwhelm. That’s both the blessing and the cursing of the current digital tsunami of content – a lot of it is very good and you want to watch it all but finding the time is a huge challenge. Continue Reading
Retro movie review: Peter Rabbit
It’s always a delicate path to navigate when you take a well-loved heritage property and attempt to give it a bright, shiny, newly relevant glow. Sometimes it can work a treat bringing a whole new raft of converts to stories that might otherwise have been deemed too old or fuddy-duddy, Continue Reading
Movie review: Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
Finding your people is one of life’s greatest joys. Not simply because belonging somewhere is the kind of cosy contented rush that money can’t buy, but because your family, and that’s what they are are in every meaningful respect, often take a form and an expression that you didn’t see Continue Reading
I need more popcorn and candy stat! My 25 favourite films of 2022
While COVID hasn’t gone away, and is currently once again doing its best to derail Christmas, 2022 did return sufficiently to something approaching normal to allow a lot of cinema visits over the last 12 months. Suddenly catching up with friends over dinner and a movie became an almost weekly Continue Reading
Movie review: Avatar – The Way of Water
In the world of Hollywood, emotively-rich dramas sit on one side of the storytelling equation and big, brassy, visually resplendent blockbusters sit on the other, and never, usually, the twain shall meet. But just occasionally, in a happy marriage of lushly visual FX, gripping narrative and compelling characters, a blockbuster Continue Reading
On 6th day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 10 more ornaments – Lightyear & Zurg, Sonic, Jawa & R2D2, Eeyore & Piglet, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Indiana Jones + more
You could be mistaken for thinking that I spend all my waking moments doing nothing but buying Christmas ornaments such is the volume of these gorgeously festive bits of plastic that are delivered to my apartment with such frequency that we are now on first name terms with the delivery Continue Reading
#Christmas movie review: The Noel Diary
That almost imperceptible sound you hear rustling above the snow is the gossamer-thin wistfully romantic softness of a thousand Christmas movies floating above your head on a wind laden with gingerbread spice and tinsel threads. Festive films are by their very nature constructions of hopes and dreams and seasonal happiness, Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I watched Spirited (movie review)
Who among us is brave enough to take on yet another adaption of the perennial Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol? Why, yes, Sean Anders I see you raising your hand, emboldened by a clever, witty, wildly original script you co-wrote with John Morris and bolstered by the presence of Continue Reading
Movie review: #Christmas on Mistletoe Farm
Appearances, opines the mysterious “they” who seems to be everywhere and opinionated about it all, can be deceiving. Sometimes a little, or in the case of Christmas on Mistletoe Farm, the tinsel-draped train wreck that ran over Santa and his elves and likely took a few unfortunate Christmas trees with Continue Reading