Recent Posts

• August 25, 2026

  Caveat

  Interesting perspective coming to Damian McCarthy’s first film after having already seen the next two. A lot of overlap, particularly with Hokum. The setup is so absurd that it’s hard to get past and take on its own merits. I had to look up their relationship, because it isn’t clear and also doesn’t really matter, but landlord Barrett hires his old tenant Isaac to effectively babysit his niece Olga for a few days at £200 a day. She is a fully grown adult, and what goes unmentioned until arrival is that a) she’s severely mentally ill and has a crossbow, b) her house is on an island with nothing else on it, and c) Isaac has to wear a harness that is chained to a peg in the basement that restricts which rooms he can enter in the house.

• August 24, 2026

  Skinamarink

  “It can’t look like this the whole time,” I think as the movie shows me an extremely fuzzy shot of part of a corridor in a family home, while some children’s feet walk through it. Then we see a bit of a ceiling while the children kind of talk to each other. There’s also a demon in the house, maybe. Reader, it did look like that the whole time, I’ve never seen such commitment to the bit. Every frame is a sea of grainy visual soup, making you work to figure out anything that’s happening. I saw it in the most ideal circumstances available to me at home: alone, quiet, dark, other than when Jones jumped in the sink to lick up some grease seconds before a pivotal moment.

• July 29, 2026

  The Odyssey

  Alright fine, I went to the IMAX. Not one of the fake ones where they make the screen a little bigger and double the ticket price, but the only legitimate IMAX in Toronto proper. I got a single ticket in the very back row, and while normally I’m a seat placement purist (a few rows back from the front, dead centre) it was totally fine. Screen was big, sound was loud, place was packed.

• July 13, 2026

  East of Eden

  I’m still out here reading books. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was about 17, didn’t like it, and remember none of it whatsoever (other than “here’s the grapes, and here’s the wrath”, which was Nelson in the Simpsons, to this day I still say “yes, yes, very good wrath”) so I’m going to consider myself as not having read any Steinbeck. Now that I have, I can safely say he’s pretty good at this. I expected the poverty, the struggle to survive and make ends meet out in the American west. I did not expect how constantly funny this was. I definitely did not expect Cathy. He will drop an all-timer paragraph or character interaction, and then do it again on the next page, hit after hit. I always thought you can pick out the best, most enduring fiction by plucking any two characters and getting deeply invested about how they would interact, because they have clear inner lives and motivation.

• June 26, 2026

  Disclosure Day

  I wasn’t dying to see this, but I went because I haven’t seen a Spielberg in the cinema since Lincoln in 2012 and how many more will there realistically be? And also because it’s not a sequel, franchise, IP, reboot, etc etc. Have to encourage that kind of thing. Spielberg is back on his aliens. I did not recognise Josh O’Connor until I saw his name in the credits, despite having seen his Knives Out movie. He, Kellner, works for some private sector equivalent of the NSA, which exists, if I remember rightly, because then they aren’t subject to government rules. Kellner sneaks a whole bunch of sensitive documents and videos out of his place of work, and goes on the run. Emily Blunt, Margaret, is a TV weather person. She has something of a mysterious role. They spend the whole time trying to escape Colin Firth, and there’s an alien doodad that does whatever the plot needs it to.