Hard to beat. Love and Honour the sadly generically titled final film in Yôji Yamada’s samurai trilogy is a sedate, old fashioned tale which features a blind swordsman. The ICA for some reason had to show it on DVD, whose reduced resolution ma[…]

It’s fourteen degrees centigrade in my room, much colder out, and at this point in January summer feels like a friend you’ve lost touch with and will never see again, but sometimes semi-recognise in the faces of strangers in the street; a[…]

(Introductory notes: my series Comics: A Beginner’s Guide seemed to go over quite well, as far as I can tell. It occurred to me that there were two other areas where I have sometimes been asked for guidance and recommendations – the other[…]

Twilight is a superhero movie. Yes, really. It posits an interesting twist to the psychological dynamics of the superhero narrative however. In superhero comics, the powered lead is usually our identification character, the story is set up to give us[…]

Some songs stand outside of time. Often they are one hit wonders, divorced from a bands career and existing with no backstory outside the song itself. So to me Echo Beach has always existed, as one of a clutch of holiday records which sound as great […]

I don’t need to say too much about Jumper. Most of my negative comments sit happily in this review from back in February. However I have had some criticism that my main criticism of the film is based around Hayden Christensen’s spoiling o[…]

Yes, yes I know. Its a Robert De Niro film. Its a Robert De Niro COMEDY. Its a Robert De Niro comedy which has a stultifying nondescript title, and turns out to be that most toothless of comedies, the Hollywood Insider Satire. It is all of that and i[…]

Delightful nonsense — that’s the standard way to write off this song, and at FT we find nothing wrong with that. Indeed some would say there is no higher accolade. However as any illuminati or discordianista will tell you, the best place […]

A quick recap!
This is a series of posts “liveblogging” the Pitchfork 500, reflecting the book’s dual purpose as criticism and playlist. The ground rule is that I do the writing in real time as I listen to the music: no edits after that (except[…]

Yes, yes I know.
This is a list of the ten worst films I saw in the cinema in 2008 and yes I knew it would be rubbish. That’s OK, there is rubbish I like. Speed Racer might turn up in my top ten and it was a narratively complex as a Ladybird bo[…]