(The start of a parallel series to that recently started on crime writing. I’ll repeat something of what I said there: I mostly read literary fiction, so I’m mostly looking for the same kind of qualities I like there in SF. I know my scie[…]

Partly as a way of getting a ‘feel’ of what people (who aren’t necessarily social media wonks) use Twitter for, I’ve conducted a little experiment – I’ve put each of the Top 40 UK singles into a Twitter search engi[…]

Feel for me. I saw Charlie Bartlett and Smart People not just in the same week, not just on the same day, but with a gap of about ten minutes between them. It was the dire double bill to end all dire double bills. And sorry Dennis Quaid, because you […]

Imagine an episode of 24 where you see the same thing happening over and over again from a different viewpoint. Each time you see a new view, you get an extra piece of information, fleshing out the story, telling you what really happened. A bit like […]

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[…]