SNAPSHOTIn a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots—fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They’re a family, hidden and safe. The day Continue Reading
Movie review: The Fabelmans
We are accustomed in this age of constant fame and unceasing veneration of achievement to assume that the great and the iconic among us have always been that way. And while, yes, true greatness or talent is often embryonic in a person, the idea that their rise to their current Continue Reading
Book review: When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins
Discovering who you actually are, assuming you are bothering to look in the first place (not everyone is), is one of life’s great gifts. It’s not always the easiest of things to uncover sometimes, and can involves a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears and challenges to who you Continue Reading
Times change. Teenagers don’t. Thoughts on That ’90s Show S1
Can you ever really go back? Or in the case of sequels to much-loved shows go forward whilst also going back? It’s a huge question and one increasingly being asked as streaming platform scour the televisual and cinematic past for properties that might have a shot at another life in Continue Reading
Mini mass of movie trailers: iMordecai, Rye Lane + Your Place or Mine
Love is a wonderful thing. Whether it finds it forms in a romantic comedy, or a touchingly comedic story, it’s good for the soul to sit through a film where the world actually feels like it could be good, funny and lovely. There’s certainly been enough of the dark stuff Continue Reading
Book review: The Storyteller’s Death by Ann Dávila Cardinal
Belonging somewhere or with someone, or a group of someones preferably since community is integral to the human condition, cuts to the core of what it means to be alive. We all know those sage observances about no one being an island and it taking a village to raise someone, Continue Reading
Boldly going animatedly towards … Thoughts on Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3
Star Trek is by and large, occasional episodes of whimsy aside, very serious science fiction. Predicated on the laudably idealistic premise that humanity, some centuries hence, has finally got its collective sh*t together and ventured into the stars where it has associated with likeminded alien species in a bravely enduring Continue Reading
A tiny ton of tantalising streaming trailers: Carnival Row (S2), The Mandalorian (S3), Hello Tomorrow!, Shrinking and The Reluctant Traveler
It was but a week ago that I remarked once again in how we are all drowning in a seas of wondrously good content. It’s definitely a first world problem and one that is luxuriously good to have but such is the vast sum of streaming shows on their way Continue Reading
Book review: Moths by Jane Hennigan
Copy for review provided by Angry Robot Books via NetGalley – publication due 14 March 2023. Humanity is balanced on a razor-thin knife edge. We may not always, or often, think so as we rush from train to work to lunch to evening function and on and on, but the Continue Reading
When you’re lost in the darkness … Thoughts on The Last of Us episode 1
One of the most jarring impacts of the last three years of the COVID pandemic has been the shaking to the core of the once cosy sense we all shared that civilisation with all the trimmings is inviolable, unbreakable and that it can withstand and endure anything. Granted, the world Continue Reading