A journal of cinema, television and the arts
Written & edited by Steve Exeter
Inspired by the New York Daily Inquirer from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
Editor’s pick
Long before Blue Moon, I had become interested in what happens to songwriting partnerships once their period of effortless alignment has passed. Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy remains one of the most perceptive explorations of that dynamic, concerned less with the triumphs of Gilbert and Sullivan than with the strain of having to…
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Sister Wives understands something many films about repression miss: the most dangerous thing in a closed system isn’t rebellion, it’s tenderness. Set inside a fundamentalist polygamous marriage, the film follows Kaidence…
I went into Song Sung Blue already inclined to like it. I was something of a musical magpie from an early, impressionable age, discovering Neil Diamond through my father’s record collection; his…
On my recent rewatch of Hello, Dolly! I was struck by how much more alive and charming it feels than its reputation suggests. For years it has been filed away…
Almost 20 years before the overhyped Inception focused on the phenomenon of dreaming Emir Kusturica directed Johnny Depp in the surreal comic fantasy Arizona Dream. The movie was produced by…
Despite taking the top awards at the 2011 Oscar Ceremony, or perhaps because of that, I was in no hurry to see director Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, although I…
Director Darren Aronofsky's award-winning film Black Swan is a dark and disturbing psychological thriller, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, focusing on the highly competitive and pressurised…
When Carnivàle premiered on BBC TV in the autumn of 2003, I eagerly anticipated it as the trailer had suggested that the show was going to share more than just…
Pilot + 6 x 50-minute drama for On Demand TV Septimius Severus died in York in 211 AD and was arguably the first black man to set foot on British soil, yet he came not…
David Suchet has been playing Hercule Poirot on television for 20 years, almost every story has been filmed and finally one of the most anticipated has marked Poirot's debut on…