SNAPSHOT Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a darkly comic drama from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh. After months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a Continue Reading
Book review: The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer
Life is a complicated thing. Anyone who has reached adulthood with life, limbs and psyche relatively intact will attest to the fact that for all its capacity for magical delight and soul-consuming wonder, life also comes with some fairly onerous demands. It’s a hard enough ask for anyone Continue Reading
Now this is music: 5 memory-rich songs
Songs, like smells, have the ability to instantly take us to places and times that played a formative, or in some cases, memorably incidental, role in our lives. It can take only a bar or two and suddenly the memories are flooding back, immersing us once again in that Continue Reading
Getting adorable in a galaxy far, far away: New-ish Star Wars Blips
There is no such thing as too much Star Wars – unless you’re a diehard Star Trek fan in which case maybe but still c’mon you can love both can’t you? – and so I bequeath these three new-ish Star Wars Blips videos which were released last month. Given Continue Reading
Finally watched … Blade Runner (movie review)
For reasons known only to the cinema gods, I managed to miss watching Blade Runner when it premiered in 1982 and in every year since. Until, of course, its much-anticipated sequel Blade Runner 2049 came on the horizon, a very close horizon at this point in time, and I decided Continue Reading
Aliens in the backyard: Juvenile Mulder and Scully search for truth in new X-Files picture book
Throughout its extensive run (1993-2002; 2016-) the evocative rallying cry for The X-Files has been “The Truth is Out There”. It hinted at mysteries untold, vast, dark conspiracies and an endlessly unnerving sense that we are not being told the truth about the world around us. But where exactly Continue Reading
Finally watched … The Good Place (S1, E 1-8)
It’s rare that you fall head over heels in love with a TV show … especially on a first viewing. Sure, you might flirt a little, watching an episode here or there. Or you might lightly date, sampling a few episodes one after the other, separated by a reasonably Continue Reading
Anna of the Apocalypse: Not a creature was stirring … except the undead
SNAPSHOT When a zombie apocalypse threatens the sleepy town of Little Haven, Anna and her high school pals must fight, sing and slash their way to survival. Teaming with her best friend John, Anna and her crew try to save family and faculty alike as they encounter zombified snowmen, Continue Reading
Connect the pre-Blade Runner 2049 dots – Blackout: 2022, 2036: Nexus Dawn and 2048: Nowhere to Run
When two films in a franchise come out thirty five years apart – that’s some kind of developement hell going on there – and are set thirty years apart, it makes sense that you might want a few pieces of bridging storytelling to connect the narrative dots. So it Continue Reading
Book review: Calling Major Tom by David M. Barnett
We live in a complicated, unforgiving world. You only have to take even momentary stock of current events to realise that there is a great deal wrong with the world we live in and never enough help to be found for those who need it. That’s why David M. Continue Reading