Review Samples

I do not know about you, but to me, about 90% of the movies you can see in cinemas nowadays are dull. I know that…

The poem Stolen Rivers is by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, an award-winning South African poet whose work focuses mainly on race, sexuality, class, and gender…

Skeptics like to debate whether humanity’s way of entertainment has changed throughout recent centuries or not. Some claim that it never did, and just as…

Whiplash (2014), directed and written by Damien Chazelle, is a film mainly about the relationship between a music teacher and his student, and what it…

Dystopia is not a new genre in literature and cinematography. Dystopian worlds have been described in the novels of such writers as Herbert Wells (the…

Creating an erotic melodrama movie is an extremely delicate matter. There is a thin line between erotics and vulgarity, and an even thinner divide between…

By Dan Schneider There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that…

By Matt Trueman Pity those parents with inquisitive kids, for they shall be faced with a barrage of whys after the Royal Court’s first ever…

By Brenda Stones This debut novel comes loaded with accolades; already the book covers and the author’s websites are stashed with tributes: the next Steinbeck,…

By Valentine Rossetti Once more, the maestro of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar, gives us a heady mixture of suspense, stormy melodrama, and theatrically dramatic characters.…

The scariest movie I watched in my childhood was definitely “Alien.” As I grew up, I watched it several more times, and although I still…

By Nicky Charlish Books do furnish a room. They also furnish impressions, and not always positive ones. The title of this one summons up the…

By Richard Swan From the time the human species developed eyes, we have stared up at the skies and speculated about the stars and the…

By Luke Douglas-Home You may have seen it at one of the many documentary festivals it has wowed, in Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham or Toronto. You…

By Matt Trueman Matilda’s got its own Spiderman in the first five minutes: a spoilt brat in crude, homemade fancy dress. The RSC’s homegrown musical…

By Jason Smith ‘Fish and chips are indigestible, expensive and unwholesome’. Eating them causes secondary poverty, which arises from the incompetent and immoral misapplication of…

By Patrick West Anti-Americanism has not always been the preserve of the liberal-left in Britain. In the UK, for instance, a not-uncommon response among conservatives…

By Nicky Charlish Every crime writer sets his or her fictional detective some challenges to face. With this book, she sets herself one, too: how…

By David Birch The tagline of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights—‘Love is a force of nature’—is almost too good. As a selling-point, it is best not…

By Sam Burt The 21st century will be Asia’s century, but it won’t necessarily be an Asian century; this seems to be the take-home message…