E-Reads: Ecstasy & Desire in Emily Dickinson
To read Dickinson is to fall, softly and irrevocably, into the mystery of want.
Review: "The Critic" is a Chilling Descent in Moral Chaos
I am the least qualified person to review movies — but, if you’re a movie buff reading this, let me offer a defense for this film all the same.
Review: Moments, by Theatre Re – 4.5 stars
Moments is a special show. A love-letter to theatre that isn’t inaccessible to non-theatre people. To the lay folks, I’d think it opens their eyes a little to the intricacies of creating theatre. To theatre folk, it’s a beautiful reminder of why we love it so much.
A Dark Way To Look At It: Interrogating Male Abuse and The Boys
Five years later, The Boys has run out of sympathy for sexual assault victims and has made them the butt of the joke.
I went to a screening of Big Shark with Tommy Wiseau so you don't have to
The plot follows three firefighters that have been tasked with stopping a killer shark from terrorising New Orleans. Pretty standard action movie stuff, right? However, Tommy Wiseau’s approach to storytelling is to ignore all the rules on how to tell a story.
Mean Girls: A Mid Movie Musical Movie
Mean Girls — the movie, the musical, the movie (again?), and the mediocrity.
Review: SPLENDOUR at Kelvin Players Theatre, Bristol
Graham’s specific mounting of the script is, I think, a triumph of performance and stagecraft. The effort and passion that have gone into this show are palpable the entire way through and all facets of this performance are deserving of applause.
Review: Asteroid City
Asteroid City takes Anderson’s trademark fussiness and spins it around like a flying saucer cheekily dancing above a desert crater, leaning us towards the absurd in the process.
Winter Reading Recommendations (or books to escape with when you're fed up of family time over the holidays)
As morning frost curls over the leaf litter, and we gently turn our smart metre display units to face the wall, we have reached one of the best times in the year for curling up with a good book by some variety of heating device. But which book? There’s so many to choose from! Well fear not, gentle readers, for Chriz is here to provide six (well technically seven) recommendations for whiling away these chilly evenings.
The Banshees of Inisherin, or is friendship real and will we all die alone
I’ve never been an Irish farmer living in Civil War Era Ireland, but it’s easy to empathise with everyone on screen; in fact, this is the first film I recall that so accurately captures the unique heartbreak of a friendship breakup.
Review: "Midnights" is a Haunting Electropop Haze
Cottagecore is dead. Synth pop reigns in Midnights.
The Longest, Saddest Blonde Joke
Blonde is pure trash that both hates and lusts after the central character. If Frollo from Hunchback of Notre Dame had access to a Hollywood production team, this is the kind of garbage he’d create.
Review: Melanin Sun (–) Blind Spots
An ambitious and thought-provoking collection of poems, Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots mixes the many reverberations of a biracial identity with a complex poetics of ambiguity.
Review: Surviving 'Men'
Men (2022) is a film about victimhood, trauma, and guilt—the ways in which we survivors can sometimes fail to move on, projecting our worst, embodied memories onto strange men around us, but also the strange men around us who truly do have the potential to be dangerous because they are men and they sniff out and exploit our vulnerability.
And Just Like That, Nobody’s Having Sex
If Sex and the City has done anything right in the past, it’s been to show us that women still have sex beyond menopause, and enjoy it. No, there’s something else going on with the new, sexless Sex and the City. And it has to do with masculinity.
Boshemia in Paris : What Emily in Paris Gets Wrong (and Right)
Boshemia designer and contributor Lauren Elizabeth, who lived in France for close to seven years, reacts to Emily in Paris.
Pandemic Television: Episodes To Quarantine To
Anyway, I guess we’re all going to die. We’re not, but I wouldn’t blame you for feeling that way. You’re stuck inside while people are literally dying and the government’s response has been objectively terrible. The only thing we can do is bake bread and watch TV.