Film, TV & Book Reviews

I can almost hear the cries of “HEATHEN!” from the angry mob of people who read the title. Furious book-readers who are now sharpening their pitchforks and igniting their torches ...

Larry David ended Curb Your Enthusiasm on April 7, 2024, closing a comedy that spent 24 years turning minor social offences into elaborate disasters. David played a semi-fictional version of himself in Los ...

Sebastian Barry’s latest novel tries to do something that seems paradoxical: to insist upon the miraculous nature of the everyday in a book telling the story of a man ...

December is when streaming companies bring out the really big guns, but November is no wimp when it comes to major releases. Today we are taking a look at what’...

As the name implies, Below makes you wonder what might be hiding beneath the surface. I have always been a fan of anything involving underwater creatures or mysterious beings lurking ...

When one of Cloud Six’s two central characters describes the low-budget, distinctly unheavenly private extension to heaven that is Cloud Six as ‘just a confusing mishmash of crazy situations ...

Pumpkin spice latte fragrance in the air, jumpers and hoodies taking the place of T-shirts in the wardrobe and colder weather takes over from the scorching summer days. In short, ...

True crime and bloodbaths are not usually my cup of tea so it was a little surprising, even to myself, when my Netflix watch was Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. ...

One of my favourite books of the past five years is Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, a novel which is, among other things, a hilarious send-up of privileged millennials living ...

Who doesn’t love a good spy thriller? The high stakes, the cloak-and-dagger meetings, the top-secret files. The shadowy world of intelligence agencies has always been fertile ground for writers ...

Defending Jacob is a drama-thriller about family and justice and the challenging question of how well we know the people closest to us. What starts as a murder investigation turns ...

By Philippa Tracy It’s 1966 and a hot summer in the fictional town of Berryview, California. Behind the ubiquitous white picket fences, there is small town gossip, chauvinistic attitudes and ...

When I was a child, my father, brother and I used to go on daily long walks. We would end up at an arcade/ice cream shop, where we had ...

For a journalist of Irish heritage living in Cyprus for decades, it might seem natural that reading a novel whose backdrop is both The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the ...

It’s a brave but not uncommon thing to write a novel about the world of comedy, especially when you’re a successful comedy writer yourself. Such a novel’s ...

The first half hour of Severance’s pilot may mislead the viewer to mistake the show as workplace satire for prestige television. However, should one commit, Dan Erickson’s magnum ...

Get out the jumpers – well, figuratively speaking, this island has beach weather up until the end of November – pop the kettle on and settle in! October is here and, as ...

What/If is one of those shows that starts with a question that sounds simple enough and then takes things somewhere you really do not expect. What would you be ...

Schools are messed up self-contained microcosms. If you ever went to one, you’ll know what I mean. Unless maybe you were one of the cool kids for whom the ...

The death of cinema has been prophesied many times, but Covid appeared to be the death knell. Streaming during that period reached its peak and photos of almost empty cinemas ...

It is almost autumn. For the rest of the world at least; Cyprus still feels like a hot summer day, and we probably will not get the autumn memo until ...

By Philippa Tracy The narrator of this novel is middle-aged law professor Tom Layward. His wife, Amy, had an affair, years earlier, with a man “she knew from synagogue.” This ...

It is not that often that a movie comes along that shakes the industry, regardless of its story. Jaws introduced the summer blockbuster, The Matrix revolutionised CGI and the Sharknado ...

Even before Alley Cats went live, reviews started popping up everywhere saying how dreadful the new series would be. Well, it’s Ricky Gervais being Ricky Gervais. Not everyone’s ...