Review Samples

By Matt Trueman Imagine if you could bathe in Macbeth. Or cut it into lines and snort it. What about painting your house Macbeth? ‘OK,’…

By Mike Jakeman Until the triumphant return of Jonathan Franzen in the autumn, it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas’ novel, The Slap, was a contender for…

There are thriller movies that rely mostly on gore—“Hostel,” “Devil’s Rejects,” “Friday 13th,” and other similar films mostly focus on murder, blood—and their thrill comes…

By Dan Schneider Sometimes the extra features on a DVD oddly turn out to surpass the featured film itself. Such is the case with the…

By Miguel Fernandes Ceia Working his way through the alphabet, Toby Litt has now delivered the letter ‘K’ with his new novel King Death. The…

By Andrew Wheelhouse ‘We think we know what’s coming. But is it already too late?’ Taglines this ominous in tone usually belong to a Roland…

By Dan Schneider Comedian Mike Nichols, in the mid-1960s, abandoned a flourishing comedy career with his partner, Elaine May, to become a filmmaker. His first…

By Dolan Cummings In The Bible Now, Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky seek to bring the insights of their academic field, critical Bible scholarship,…

Cyberpunk science fiction has not been a popular genre during the last decades. Originating from the novels by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov,…

I am a great fan of Mohsin Hamid. The Reluctant Fundamentalist caught the post-9/11 zeitgeist like no other novel, and his debut book, Moth Smoke,…

By Miriam Gillinson Richard II was only 10 years old when he ascended the throne and this early rise to power is stamped all over…

By Miriam Gillinson An acid attack as a symbol of love. A girl whose skull cracks and bleeds, if she is not invited in. Countless…

By Miriam Gillinson A perfect engine, a human soldier, a “kind of nothing.” Coriolanus is a steaming cauldron of a role, a man as hot…

By Nicky Charlish What do faith and fashion have in common? At first glance, nothing. One is concerned with unchanging verities, the other with the…

The subject of mental disorders has long become a niche for all kinds of thriller and horror movies. Roughly 80% of movies dedicated to this…

By Richard Swan Very occasionally a book comes along that changes your life, in the sense that it alters your thinking and causes you to…

By Nicky Charlish Postwar British history has been a fruitful furrow for scholars to plough. After books covering a range of subjects from the New…

Perhaps no other country has produced as many horror movies as the United States—and no other country can call itself the motherland of the most…

Movies about contacts with aliens are so numerous that counting all of them would probably be an impossible task. Aliens abduct, scrutinize, infiltrate, devastate, enslave,…

Throughout the last two decades, videogames have made a huge leap forward in terms of graphic technologies, gameplay mechanics, realism, and immersiveness, turning from a…