One of the many smart ways that Memento works its gimmick (and it’s a shame that a film that tries so hard to transcend will always be “that backwards film”) is that it produces the same effect in the hero and the audience by opposi[…]

Tom’s Top Twelve this week is very much the Richard X Tribute Edition. All week I’ve been playing 80s records, to the point of making Isabel complain: I now think this was subconscious preparation for hearing Richard X. Often in comics or[…]

It must be getting on for fifteen years ago that my good friend Daniel wrote “…on some days I listen to just one song, once”. That song was “Stumble” by Emily, still one of the greatest records I’ve ever heard. I&#[…]

Dual stories, historical hokum. I have a feeling that the literary establishment would not consider The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris in the same sort of exulted breath as The Athenian Murders, but it plays the same kind of game. In story one w[…]

A relaunch for Stylus which should see it further shake off its (sometimes justified) rep as a kind of Pitchfork Junior. Under the scarily young and eager Todd Burns it’s always had a slightly broader focus than Pitchfork, paying a lot of atten[…]

When I think about going out to eat in the abstract, I have no trouble at all imagining myself to be the bold provocative food-pioneer who will eagerly try the most forbidding thing on the menu: viz the legendary “fish lips and duck webs”[…]

The lead character in Cypher is called Morgan Sullivan. So pleased was I with the Preston Sturges nod that I was more than willing to suspend my higher critical faculties as this film tiptoed around territories usually inhabited by films whose credi[…]