The Brown Note Movie Review

Blue Beetle (2023) Movie Review

Fitting perfectly in with the post Endgame malaise of terrible failures of comic book superhero movies but with a Latino twist! Amazingly rote and unambitious stuff at this stage.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) Movie Review

I thought the worst that could happen was a 6/10 and it couldn't physically be possible to make a worse Indi film than the Crystal Skull. I was wrong. Not only is it just a stupid and bad, it's also far more boring. For an unforgivable lack of imagination, a dullness beyond belief, the worst ever on screen use of Mad Mikkelsen, an awful Phoebe Waller-Bridge character and nearly no sequence that either sticks in the memory or justifies it being one of the most expensive films of all time - a BIG FAT ZERO OUT OF TEN.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023) Movie Review

What in tarnation is one time enfant terrible Ben Wheatley doing directing this!? (seriously, watch The Kill List or Sightseers). Happily, nearly everything is done better here than the lackluster first film, including a magnificent final third.

Aphex Twin - Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP (2023) EP Review

An entirely listenable but also slight release from the greatest electronic musician of all time.

Jessy Lanza - Love Hallucination (2023) Album Review

I've featured all four of the Canadian electronic chanteuses albums on my radio show and love her style, this is another fine entry, but I definitely prefer the more upbeat, percussive tracks to the slow burn FKA Twigs adjacent/quiet storm material.

Perfect 10’s: Love - Forever Changes (1967) Album Review

Recent reviews of the new album by acoustic-led psych folk band The Clientele and the paranoid existential post Vietnam fever dream film Jacob's Ladder, both led me back to one of my favorite albums of all time. Impossibly predicting the fall out of and come down from the summer of love, whilst in the middle of it in 1967, the LA band Love created a twitching, dread-fueled, schizophrenic masterpiece of incredible songwriting, mind-blowing arrangements, incredible lyrics and existential dread.

The Clientele- I Am Not There Any More (2023) Album Review

The longstanding UK psych-folk-indie band break out of their confines, with a hugely welcome tilt towards more experimental fare and one of the best albums of the year.

The Omen (1976) Film Review

The fascinatingly diverse late director, Richard Donner, certainly created an archetype that has proven potent to this day, with his iconic first big hit. The modern wave of horror from Hereditary to Insidious to Sinister all crib from the mounting family dread over a possessed child, that admittedly is also post The Exorcist. What is often hokum wins here by playing it with a straight face, having zero fat on the screenplay and a titan like Gregory Peck at the helm. It still packs a lean punch.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990) Film Review

I sat down on a Friday night to watch what I thought from memory, was an agreeable mash up of Platoon and The Sixth Sense. I was wrong, and immediately regretted my choice. It was closer to a mash up of Requiem For a Dream and Uncut Gems. The film from my youth was far more unrelentingly intense, harrowing and depressing than I'd remembered. It was also far more profound, beautiful, moving and unusual than it's ever given credit for. Tim Robbins stars as a man driven to psychosis by his post Vietnam waking nightmare, in director Adrian Lyne's hugely influential yet still underappreciated near masterpiece. Be warned though - this is an unexpectedly tough ride.

Heart Of Stone (2023) Movie Review

29% on Rotten Tomatoes for the new Netflix, Gal Gadot starring, Mission Impossible rip off, a right royal trashing. For the first half hour, I toyed with turning it off - the dialogue was so trite and the tech angle so grating. But after the film calmed itself down, it was a perfectly well plotted and performed hokey fun spy film, with plenty of action, that was less generic than I'd been led to believe, and not as bombastic as something like The Grey Man. Gal is great and the whole shebang is surprisingly agreeable - I wouldn't mind them coming back tbh.