“There are many events in the womb of time which will be deliver’d,” says Shakespeare’s Iago. One such occurrence might be a fair hearing for Tenet. I rarely feel compelled to step up to the plate for films of this scale, but this strangest of would-be blockbusters was doomed to…

Let’s take a tour — I only watched On the Silver Globe because they were about to take it away from me. There it was, nestled away on the BFI Player (a platform I’ve been hymning since my earliest days on Medium), sitting idly on my to-watch list — that is, until the clock started…

You might think I’m unqualified to comment on Pam & Tommy because I never watched Baywatch and I never listened to Mötley Crüe. In fact, with the exception of Spinal Tap, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to any band who spell their name with a redundant umlaut. (Sex Farm…

Brace yourself for incoming, obsessively-referenced fandom: Laura Snapes never steers me wrong. She’s my favourite music writer. From the punishing beats of Marie Davidson through to the apocalyptic folk of The Weather Station, she has expanded my musical world through her taste, her advocacy, and her irresistible prose. Her excoriations…

All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence, ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’ At first it seems that Benny’s going to be…

Content Warning: discussion of fictional and historical sexual assault. Only a few medieval women had the means to raise their voices in protest against the idea that women even enjoyed being taken by force. Christine de Pisan, in her book The City of Ladies (1405), wrote that women “take absolutely…

Welcome back to Simpsons Total Recall, in which I occasionally challenge myself to write up a classic episode of the series entirely from memory. I say Radioactive Man! and you say either Jiminy Jillikers! or My eyes, the goggles do nothing! If memory serves…

Last night I dreamed I went to Arrakis again . . . Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was my film of the year. I normally try to avoid hyping up releases of this size but it was everything I had so desperately wanted it to be. I turned thirty-three and my flatmates…

In December of 1830 the Royal Irish Academy declared a competition. A gold medal and fifty pounds would be awarded to the best essay on the most enduring mystery of the island’s architectural patrimony. From Antrim to Kerry they had stood since time immemorial, some of them thirty metres tall…