Expectations are curious creatures; sometimes they are too weighty and hinder the book’s or film’s imaginative flight. I’ve always looked forward to an Ian McEwan novel. I loved his Austenite homage in Atonement, the reflective stock-taking in Saturday and the inventiveness of Amsterdam. In the main, I am deaf to accusations that he writes middle-brow Read More
Studio Ghibli is perhaps Japan’s best known animation studio with accolades and awards (including an Oscar) heaped upon Hayao Mayazaki and his team. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a hardcore Ghibli fan, having seen most of their films (some even obsessively). Ghibli’s narratives use children or young adults as main characters who, Read More
Only God Forgives is a fascinating film. That being said, it is definitely not for everybody. It takes some time to warm to director Nicolas Winding Refn’s style but once you have adjusted to the disorientating cinematography, it is incredibly intense and moving. Central to the plot are the emotional and psychological issues that Julian Read More
Inspired by an incident at SeaWorld Orlando in which an Orca Whale attacked and killed its trainer, Blackfish originated from director Gabriella Copperthwaite’s desire to understand what might cause a highly intelligent animal to “bite the hand that feeds”. The result is a fascinating and tragic documentary that explores the intimate yet uneasy relationship between Read More
Alienation seems to be the prevailing theme throughout director Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. After the everyman saviour of the world in Shaun of the Dead (2004) (the “Strawberry” Cornetto) and the exceptional cop thrown into a village of corruption represented in Hot Fuzz (2007) (the “Original” blue), Wright and co-writer Simon Pegg tackle Read More
Cal McGill is back. The sea detective, introduced in the eponymous novel of 2011, gets involved in a second adventure that brings together old and new family models, suppressed secrets, unrequited love and the mysteries of the ocean. In a crowded market, authors of crime or mystery fiction have to try ever harder to make Read More
Wadjda is a film by Saudi Arabia’s first female director, Haifaa Al-Mansour. The plot revolves around a young Saudi girl called Wadjda who is trying to discover herself, questioning her place in society as a result. Wadjda is the first film to have been made by a woman within Saudi Arabia, and as such, proved Read More
Connoisseurs of literary novels are sometimes known to have a somewhat sniffy attitude towards genre fiction. But what happens when literary novels themselves become generic and derivative? Take Francesca Rhydderch’s debut novel, The Rice Paper Diaries for example. Set primarily in Hong Kong before and during the Japanese invasion, and in Wales in the years Read More
Susie Nott-Bower’s debut novel, The Making of Her, is a meditation on contemporary media perceptions of ageing, menopause and celebrity. It sets out to question how television reflects the values of a globalised consumer culture and how, in its turn, influences attitudes concerning body-image, gendered identities and aesthetic perceptions. These issues are mediated through the Read More
A.E. Stringer’s third collection, Late Breaking, can perhaps best be described as a volume of visual poetry, largely focussed as it is on descriptions of the world around him, encompassing painted landscapes, animal encounters or more general musings on aspects of popular culture. Throughout the collection, these poems remain descriptive works, disinterested in any larger Read More