A Real Pain: Tourists and Cartographers
How 2024’s A Real Pain reminds us that in the suffering of others- trivial, personal or historic- we are all tourists.
A Real Pain: Look At Him Go
How 2024’s A Real Pain examines what it means to be an outsider looking in at pain, anguish and struggling, and what it takes to reach out further than you thought you could.
Christmas Unwrapped, or, What Does Your Favourite Christmas Song Say About You?
It's just not the same as an adult. It can’t be the same, it won’t ever be the same, and it’s fine that it’s not the same.
Remembrance Day: The Death of a National Symbol
For the poppy, it has been a decade of fanatical lunacy. What once was a classy and sombre symbol of thoughtful remembrance, has now become a disgusting competition of virtue signalling, wherein the act of celebrating the symbol is far more important than the meaning behind it.
On Leaving Messages
Are we leaving messages enough these days? What does that look like in our daily lives?
Disco Elysium: One Day I Will Return To Your Side
How ZA/UM’s 2019 masterpiece explores revolution, abandonment and how to be a person… again.
Will We Remember The First Time?
Wouldn’t it be so much easier if I could teleport there instead? In the blink of an eye, trading a rainy office block in Nottingham for a sunny beach in the Maldives. Wouldn’t that be so much more convenient? Perhaps not.
When everything Stops Making Sense
This slender, strikingly skinny, nimble, odd Roy Keane lookalike. He was dancing, contorting, convulsing his way through a song I’d never heard before. I’d never heard of the Talking Heads, nor David Byrne before this. Instantly, I was enamoured.
Reality, as presented in a JPEG
Lamppost in the background of your graduation photo looks a bit shit? We can cut that out. Blurry stranger ran past just as you took the perfect post night-out selfie? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Stepson is just kind of ugly and ruined all of your wedding pics purely by virtue of being in them? We’ll make sure you never have to look at that disgusting little cretin’s face ever again.
Time Loops and Polaroids: How Life is Strange (2015) offers a Singular Depiction of life as an autistic person
‘We see the world through autistic eyes, and her in her own terms.’
67,000,000 Angry Men
“What if there’s an ambulance and it’s a matter of life or death?”
This is absolutely a fair question, and one that I wish there was a better answer for, because the honest answer is: so what?
Oppenheimer: You Must Come Burdened
By never straying from the perspective of its subject, Oppenheimer asks us to judge The Father Of The Atom with our knowledge of everything he refused to face.
“Asteroid City” is written in inverted commas: Wes Anderson & Artifice
Asteroid City is written in inverted commas. A short essay about Wes Anderson and artifice.
Directors and Influences: Chantal Akerman and Charlotte Wells
The first in a series discussing Directors and their Influences, a look at Chantal Akerman and Charlotte Wells.
Raphael’s Women and the Universal madonna
“His work is charged with a kind of charisma and romanticism that other Renaissance artists- even technically more masterful ones- lack.”
Purgatorial Cinema: The Films of Lee Chang-Dong
“Few films have the epic emotional detail like those of South Korea’s Lee Chang-Dong”