Sesame Street is 50 years old this year! That’s a lot of words of the day, pearls of wisdom, Grover-led hilarity and learning opportunities dispensed to the children of the world, especially those in disadvantaged situations, and Sesame Workshop, the organisation behind Sesame Street since 1969 when it all began, Continue Reading
Star Trek Discovery: “Point of Light” (S2, E3 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND MUCH FIERY KLINGON-NESS … AND FAMILIAL ANGST … The big question for this episode of Star Trek Discovery, entitled “Point of Light” (or seven of them but it’s only one episode and who’s got time, narratively-speaking, for seven of the damn things?) is whether in space, Continue Reading
Mary Poppins Returns: Here’s what you might have missed
As sequels go, Mary Poppins Returns is almost within a class of its own. Released 54 years after the original Mary Poppins came out in 1964, it is every bit a much for its predecessor, drawing more faithfully off the books by P. L. Travers while also hearkening back many Continue Reading
Book review: Your Second Life Begins When You Realize You Only Have One by Raphaëlle Giordano
Have you ever had one of those friends who found themselves a new religion or transformative way of thinking, one so powerful that it completely changed and profoundly the way they approached life that they talked about nothing else every time you saw them? Even worse, so enthusiastic was their Continue Reading
Pobody’s nerfect! Well the cast of The Good Place kind of are in this on-set video
Who doesn’t love to pull back the curtain, The Wizard of Oz-style – well, in that case the Wizard wasn’t a fan which was, fair enough I guess; he had a lot to hide – and see what happens before the glitz and the glamour, or in the case of Continue Reading
Movie review: Ben is Back
Hope is an intensely powerful thing. It persists in the belief that things can, and will be better, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, when events time and again betray the fact that the thing that is being hoped against has already, regrettably, come to pass. Continue Reading
The sublime in the mundane: Ross Marquand impersonates A-list stars doing everyday things
You could be forgiven for being surprised that Ross Marquand, who plays beleaguered survivor Aaron on AMC’s The Walking Dead (to be fair every single last person on the show is beleaguered), is a man of 1001 celebrity impressions. But he is, and damn good ones at that, and the Continue Reading
Let’s talk about Sex Education baby
Love is, for all its Hallmark-tinged, Valentine’s Day-enabled, rose-tinted loveliness, a very messy business in the real world. Just how messy becomes clear in Netflix’s new eight-part show Sex Education in which the students at a British private school, Moreland, as typical a hotbed of hormones and unbridled lust as Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: Artists draw their greatest fears, inspired by Bird Box
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who, in his first inaugural speech in 1933, famously said, “the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself.” And while that may well be true, the fact is there are a great many other things to fear as Netflix’s recent hit film, Bird Box, Continue Reading
Movie review: Aquaman
(image via IMP Awards) Being a superhero is a pretty serious undertaking. You are, after all, usually the one responsible for not only stopping the bad guy/gal/weird mutant person with delusions of grandeur from ending the world in some of over-complicated and avowedly-cataclysmic fashion, but also coping with a host Continue Reading