So Mark Haddon wins the Whitbread Prize for The Curious Incidence Of The Dog In the Night. Deserved? I think so. In a year where publishing sensations seem to pop out of the woodwork every couple of months, this is the one whichI was actually moved t[…]

Film titles which promise much but do not deliver. There is no point in Runaway Jury where the twelve just and true ones decide they have had enough of this tedious trial mularkey and scarper from the box. Nowhere dow we see them being persued by the[…]

Timeline is a thoroughly entertaining lousy movie. (okay, lousy movie Monday has finished, but there are just too many lousy films in this world to just fit in one day). Hacked back to life one imagines in an edit suite by someone who has no interest[…]

As part of Do You See? lousy movie Monday I bring you, a lack of appreciation for Scary Movie 3:
How much to you enjoy watching people being hit? This is the question Scary Movie 3 poses, because as far as I could work out about the only joke in the […]

When is a novel not a novel? When it is actually a loosely connected set of short stories, or novellas. Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only In London uses this trick, hoping that the resonances between her three tales will add more than the sum of its parts[…]

Hey, hey OSCAR!!!! Over here!!! Look at me. I’m a serious film. Look I’ve got Oscar winning Anthony Hopkins in me. Not only that but Oscar winning chart topping Nicole Kidman (and hey, like you’re going to give an Oscar to The Last […]

The world wide web has failed me. Pink Clove, the gloopy dark red drink which came back into my life last year (see entries on the Harlequin ) has zero presence on the interweb. Now I don’t expect all drinks to have all singing, all dancing web[…]

What is the importance of Tokyo in Ozu’s Tokyo Story? The disaffected kids of the Hirayama’s live there, but is the film suggesting it is Tokyo that has made them a pain in the arse? It is a suggestion that Hanif Kureshi filched in The Mo[…]

Maybe the saddest thing about A Mighty Wind is that it is unlikely to spark a folk revival, because none of these folk bands are real. It is a pity that there isn’t a six album back catalogue of the Folksmen or Mitch And Mickey to follow up on[…]

Black And White is a lot more engrossing than its cookie cutter equal rights presentation would suggest. Yes, the film is just a dramatisation of the courtroom battle that abolished capital punishment in Southern Australia, but the story has a slight[…]