Film, TV & Book Reviews

I’ll be the first to admit that there have been occasions where a joke will go over my head. And even more times when I’ve read or heard ...

HBO Max dipped its toes into the massive IP that is Game of Thrones last week by premiering the first episode of its new spin-off series, A Knight of the ...

Finding love takes work. You go out, to dating nights maybe, give dating apps a go, have your friends introduce you to people, and eventually you might meet someone. But ...

It strikes me that colder, darker days require more laughter than the brightness and warmth of most of the Cypriot year. Fortunately, as a side-effect of my decision that the ...

It has been scientifically proven that it is impossible for Lord of the Rings fans to watch the scene where Aragorn kicks the orc helmet without declaring to anyone within ...

Few non-Western shows have become as iconic as Death Note. Some 20 years after its release, it has numerous adaptations, from live-action films to spinoffs and video games. It is certainly ...

By Philippa Tracy Artificial Intelligence (AI) entered the zeitgeist a while ago. And while Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability plays out as a family drama, it is essentially about the ethics ...

We love television for many reasons, but the biggest one is escapism and comfort. TV is a controlled environment, whereas real life is chaos. Anything can happen at any moment, ...

The Polish Netflix series 1670 is a mockumentary-style satire that follows the feuds and misadventures of a noble family in the 17th-century village of Adamczycha, in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian ...

2025 felt a bit uneven as far as literary fiction went, with a number of big-name writers and novels failing to live up to their billing. But as the year drew ...

2025 has been a surprisingly good year for the cinema industry, both commercially and artistically, giving many hope that perhaps it has finally found its footing and entered a long-awaited redemption ...

Following David Lynch’s sad passing this year, I decided to revisit that distant town in the Pacific Northwest of Twin Peaks. Released in 1990, it appeared a rather unassuming soap ...

I look forward to my annual Jack Reacher novel, especially as they always come out around the time of year that back in the cultural golden age of the nineties ...

We know post-apocalyptic shows all too well, from zombies to brain-infecting fungal viruses, but a disease carried by rainfall? That might be a first. In Netflix’s The Rain, siblings ...

By Philippa Tracy In this novel, set in the mid-19th century with a cast of many characters the most interesting ones are the women. There is Clorinda Morrissey, who ...

For years, we talked endlessly about the so-called Streaming Wars. For a brief period, the battlefield was wide open, with Netflix holding a narrow advantage through sheer global reach. HBO ...

Imagine going on an exciting trip with your dad, only to find he is never taking you back to your mother. In Netflix’s Mexican thriller, No One Saw Us ...

There’s a brilliant moment in the BBC comedy Upstart Crow when Shakespeare – played by David Mitchell – defends his work as a comic writer by saying, ‘If you do your ...

’Tis the season to be binging tra la la la! If there is one time when it is socially acceptable to stay home and watch TV all day long, that’...

The House Beside the River (To Spiti Dipla sto Potami) is a TV adaptation of Lena Manda’s best-selling novel of the same name. The series traces the lives of ...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s last novel, Checkout 19, was one of the best things I read in 2022. In 2025, Bennett is back with another novel that plays with the slipperiness, vitality and insufficiency ...

A decade ago, when Netflix decided to take a risk with Stranger Things, not even the most optimistic executive could have guessed how enormously successful it was going to be. ...

I could bet that whatever’s been stressing you out lately is not a sassy interdimensional triangle. But maybe it should be, just for a little while. Allow me to ...

By Philippa Tracy At the centre of the tragicomic debut novel At the Table is the Maguire family, Linda and Gerry, and their two 30-something children, Nicole and Jamie. Over ...