Ours, like all cities, really is an incredible place to visit on a stopover. It’s hot enough to melt your socks off. The flattering locals are eager to please your discerning eagle-eye. It’s your vacation flight’s top interlude of the season. As you step off the plane, the engine oil…

Tom McTague’s recent puff piece for Boris Johnson in the Atlantic is a multistory of failure. While falling for a scam once may be excusable, Tom McTague manages the journalistic equivalent of repeatedly buying the Eiffel Tower while continuously insisting this time he got the real thing. I will not…

Best Hereditary As a horror fan, I am excited to live in this little golden age of horror. Recent years have seen new classics like The Witch and The Babadook, and Hereditary is now another. Hereditary showed us the intimate and destructive power of mental illness. It is uncompromising in unsettling…

The Crimes of Grindelwald probably makes for a good book. It does not make a good movie. It’s not that I dislike the actors, the direction, the visual effects, which are all fine. The story just feels like it needs 600 pages of prose to achieve coherence. Before I get…

The Referendum, potentially: There is a vigorous public debate based on the facts of membership of the European Union with good faith arguments on all sides. The Referendum, stupidly: The media allows the debate to be dominated by a bunch of fringe extremists who make wild unchallenged assertions that so…

On the Fucked-Up State of the World and of My Life in Particular This morning I lay in bed listening to Pet Sounds and trying to cry. I was not successful. I had just texted my manager to say I would not be coming into work today. Three days ago…

Hereditary and Mental Illness Hereditary is terrifying audiences (or at least critics) the world over. There is a fair amount of discussion developing about the ending, with criticisms that it becomes too over-the-top and too overtly supernatural. I understand this, but I do still think the entire movie can be…

Obviously, I’m not going to be the dickhead putting spoilers on Twitter or Tumblr or whatever, but I have some thoughts about Infinity War I want to quickly type up here. First, overall, I greatly enjoyed Infinity War. I would characterise it like this: it was slightly above expectations, but…

First off, apologies if I make any factual mistakes in this review: it will be the first such review based on an episode I saw after a few sherries. That said, however, there wasn’t much to this episode. Picking up where series 10 ended, the Doctor meets the Doctor resisting…