Film, TV & Book Reviews

By Philippa Tracy Sally Rooney writes about complicated and unconventional relationships, about pain, loneliness and love. In this her fourth novel, she also explores grief. At the heart of the ...

How often do you get the chance to scratch something off the bucket list? For me, it happened this past week, when I got the opportunity to briefly work on ...

At the heart of the all-American National Football League (NFL), where the spotlight shines brightly on the feats of quarterbacks and running backs, Netflix pulls sports fans, especially those passionate ...

By Simon Demetriou We are told early on in Bullwinkel’s terrific debut novel that it ‘was not as if women’s boxing was, or ever had, or ever would ...

Left on the cutting room floor is a term used in the TV and film industry, referring to a scene or scenes that were cut out of the theatrical release. ...

Imagine a crime that keeps on happening across the centuries. Exactly the same. Identical. The same murder, the same location, the same conditions. Everything about it is as peculiar and ...

As so often, I am late to the party on this one; The Empusium is my first Tokarczuk read. The party I anticipated was a big one: a novel by ...

By Alexa Scarlata The Australian commissioning team at Netflix has had a pretty good run over the past 12 months. In January, the adaptation of Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows ...

Do you watch a docudrama and spend half your time Googling to see how much of it was true? Perhaps with this in mind, a couple of weeks after Monsters: ...

By Philippa Tracy The Echo Chamber is a hilarious social satire on the state of contemporary Britain and the dangers of social media. Each character is a parody that exists ...

Last week, chairwoman of Warner Bros. Television Group – the world’s biggest television studio – described bringing Harry Potter to the small screen as a dream. She was at an industry ...

By Morgan West If you’re drawn to the glamour of the 1970s or captivated by true crime, Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist might just be your new binge! ...

There are times in life when what you really need is an expensive psychic to tell you ‘This is bigger than you and your silly heteronormative daydreams, Jane. This is ...

Trap Like most M. Night Shyamalan movies, Trap has a set-up that is too ridiculous to be believed: Josh Harnett plays a psychotic serial killer who is also a father ...

If it wasn’t for the charismatic Haris Alexiou playing the grandmother in Greek drama series Maestro in Blue, I may not have watched the first season to the end, ...

By Nathan Abrams When director James Cameron’s The Terminator hit cinemas in 1984, it forever altered the landscape of science fiction. Released 40 years ago, the plot unfolds against the backdrop ...

It seems a little uncharitable towards a book in which the professedly at-least-semi-autobiographical narrator uses writing, and is using this writing specifically, as a kind of coping mechanism for PTSD, ...

Why are we so drawn by true crime shows? What is it that keeps us glued to the screen while we watch horrible acts of true depravity? Is it because ...

Set in 1348, The Decameron follows a group of young people who flee to the idyllic Villa Santa in the countryside to escape a plague ravaging Florence. This might sound familiar ...

By Philippa Tracy These days fewer unmarried people choose to tie the knot. Perhaps this is why divorce rates have been falling over the last 20 years. In 1937, when Laurence Olivier ...

“Leave the gun, take the canolli,” says the mobster to his partner, moments after carrying out an execution. This bone-chilling scene from The Godfather will forever be etched in our ...

I am not really a fan of Benedit Cumberbatch’s acting. He always seem to play the same character, stuck on the right (or wrong?) side of the UK’s ...

By Xavier Aldana Reyes In the 1980s, film scholar Barbara Creed coined the term “monstrous-feminine”. It refers to the way that female monsters are typically portrayed as threatening and disgusting ...

Everybody knows that Arthur is the once and future king of Britain. The premise of Lev Grossman’s latest sprawling fantasy is to explore what happens in the early part ...