Humanity has a perverse gift for shooting itself comprehensively in the foot even as it tries to take heady and hopeful steps into a necessary future. This enduring Achilles Heel is on full and invigoratingly involving display in Laura Lam’s novel Goldilocks, which is less about bears, young girls and Continue Reading
Dive into the mysteries of the universe: Thoughts on Tales from the Loop
There is an exquisite aching beauty and deep, abiding emotional resonance to every single frame in Tales From the Loop. Inspired by the retro-futuristic-bucolic artwork of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag and drawing its name from the title of his book, Tales From the Loop is an eight-part artwork all of Continue Reading
Book review: The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Ladies and gentlemen of the pandemic current – even Doctor Dolittle has taken an apocalyptic turn, something that shouldn’t surprise in an age when horror seems to be writ large on just about every part of the human experience. Granted, Hugh Lofting, who penned the Doctor Dolittle series, saw his Continue Reading
Movie review: Project Power
Humanity may not be awash in actual mutants or those with special powers – well, not yet anyway; who knows which way the evolutionary cookie may crumble – but the movies we watch certainly are. You can’t enter a cinema (figuratively anyway; literally, it’s a literal trickier in COVID-rampant 2020) Continue Reading
Some people are just born to be buried: The Devil all the Time (trailer)
SNAPSHOTIn Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters — an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — converge around young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. Spanning the time Continue Reading
Book review: The Operator by Gretchen Berg
Of the many things we mythologise in society, and they are great and many because life very rarely matches our ideal, small towns sit very close to the top of the aspirational heap. We see them as some perfect urban realisation of community, a place where you are known and Continue Reading
What makes an adventure feel adventurous? Lessons From the Screenplay takes a look at The Pirates of the Caribbean
SNAPSHOTPirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl showcases the best of the adventure genre by using key genre elements as fundamental building blocks of the story and character design. In this video, the LFTS team explores four critical components of classic adventure films, dives into the deeper Continue Reading
Book review: Come Again by Robert Webb
Life is, we know all too well, a one-way street. We are born, we live, we die with no chance of going back for any kind of do-over and absolutely no prospect of taking hard-won lessons back to situations crying out for their accrued wisdom. And yet, what if one Continue Reading
Nothing going right? It’s The Goes Wrong Show!
SNAPSHOTThe Goes Wrong Show is probably the funniest comedy the BBC has shown in years. Based on the theatrical monsters from the Mischief Theatre that have filled London’s West End in recent years, including The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields, Peter Pan Goes Continue Reading
Book review: State Highway One by Sam Coley
Home. For many people, it’s an almost physical concept, an idyll in an often-unwelcoming world where the people who love them and who have their back provide respite from the contrary vicissitudes of life. But for others like Aucklander Alex Preston, the protagonist of Sam Coley’s mesmerisingly-evocative State Highway One, Continue Reading