Stuff and Things

Imagine, if you will, that you have a soul. A tangible soul that you can actually touch, full of tenderness and joy and sweet delicious sorrow...all of 'the feels' as the kids today say. Now imagine having that soul pulled out of your body and inviting a gang of football hooligans to stamp on it for 41 minutes and 34 seconds. That is the experience of listening to Mount Eerie's 'A Crow Looked At Me'.  There have been several albums made about death, particularly around the mid-to-late 2010's - David Bowie's 'Blackstar' (2015), Nick Cave's 'Skeleton Tree' (2016) and 'Carrie & Lowell' by Sufjan Stevens (2015) being standouts among the genre - but none of those efforts, or indeed any album in the history of music, tackled the subject in the utterly unflinching way shown here. It is completely unyielding in it's grief, and although it is by no means an easy or even a pleasant listen, it is an essential one.   To clarify, this ...

Okay here it is. The big one. The biggest director in the world adapting the epic to end all epics. Shot entirely in IMAX 70mm magnificence, starring possibly the finest actor of his generation, and filmed in locations all over the world. This is big. As big as big can get. And it's finally here.  Homer's original story, widely considered one of the most (if not the most) seminal works in the history of mankind, focuses on the time after the Trojan War. The Greeks have won thanks in no small part to the lead of this story, Odysseus, and now it's time to head home which, for all involved, is easier said than done. What follows is classic Christopher Nolan, time-jumping between multiple narratives and ratcheting up the pace to breakneck levels in the process. It is a style first deployed in 'Dunkirk' (2017) and he hasn't looked back since. It is a quite dizzying method of filmmaking that makes little concession for the casual viewer. You need to pay attention to e...

It seems hard to recall here in 2026, but there once was a time when Robert DeNiro was the man in the business of show. With a career forged in towering, serious, dramatic performances of range and seemingly unlimited skill - he was, at a certain time, the absolute best actor in the business and every new DeNiro film released was an event in and of itself.  However by 1988 he wanted a change of pace. Coming off the back of a memorable turn as Al Capone in Brian DePalma's 'The Untouchables' (1987), rumours began to circulate that DeNiro wanted to try his hand at comedy - at the time a u-turn considered by most as unthinkable. As fate would have it, the George Gallo-penned 'Midnight Run' found its way into his hands and the rest, as they say, is history. Helmed by the red-hot-at-the-time Martin Brest, the resulting film tells a cross country tale of betrayal, greed, violence, revenge and, ultimately, love. Oh, and car chases. Plenty of car chases.  You see, the actio...

It has been said that you can often judge a person's inner state not by their words, but their actions. If this is indeed true, then it would seem fair to say that John Cassavetes, when making this film, had obviously grown tired of being a marquee studio actor, felt constrained by the Hollywood process and felt the need to express himself in the most unhinged way imaginable. The result is this film.  To say that this film bucks traditional convention would be like saying breaking your femur bone stings a little. This film goes so far outside the box in what we, the average audiences of the western world, are used to seeing that you could argue it's barely a film at all. Yes, there are actors. Yes, there are cameras rolling and lights and microphones, but that is about where the comparison to the art form we all know and love ends.  The plot, if you can call it that, revolves around three middle-aged friends - played by Cassavetes, Peter Falk (of Columbo fame) and Ben Gazzara ...

On the quiet, Richard Linklater has carved out a deeply impressive directorial career over the years. From his breakout hit 'Dazed & Confused' (1993) to the 12 year odyssey (and Academy Awards darling) 'Boyhood' (2013), he has not only brought a completely original style to cinema but is probably one of the few auteurs birthed in the 90s independent film movement who manages to have written and directed a wide, varied, cannon of work.   To further illustrate this point, after the success of 'Dazed & Confused' - one of the great high-school, teen, stoner ensemble films of all time - he took an instant about turn and made an understated romantic drama featuring two people talking for an hour and forty minutes. In other hands, this concept might have been insufferable. In the capable hands of Linklater, it is anything but.  It sounds hard to believe here in 2026, but there used to be a time when a lot of films were, gulp, dialogue-driven and, double-gulp, a...

Prior to the release of this album, art-rock whizz kids Everything Everything had certainly shown some promise on the indie scene but threatened to fall into the mire of decent-but-never-great bands that were, for a while, the order of the day.  Their first effort 'Man Alive' was a band finding it's feet. Their next release, 'Arc' showed a giant step forward in terms of songwriting ability and spawned classic weirdo anthems like 'Kemosabe' and 'Cough Cough'. Then came the most critical point in the life of any band - do they step up and make the leap into greatness, or do they fall back into relative obscurity? So many fall prey to the latter, but, with the release of 'Get To Heaven', the answer for this band was emphatically the former.  10 years after it's release this album still holds up as the high water mark in this band's existence. It is a seminal collection of 11 tracks that delve into the darkest parts of the human psyche wh...

Since it's inception, the movie business has captured the imagination of the masses all over the world. Hollywood, at least it's in heyday, was the epitome of glamour itself. A place where all you had to have was a dollar and a dream and you too could one day find yourself under the bright lights. However, by the late 1960s, Hollywood's glory days seemed to be hanging by a thread and a new wave of revolutionary filmmakers were coming forth, influenced by the counter-culture of the day and determined to destroy the studio system as they knew it.  Peter Biskind's book focuses specifically on this time period and the characters around the movement we now know as 'New Hollywood'. Beginning with 'Bonnie & Clyde' (1967), this book takes us on a wild and wonderful journey through a series of films, all the way up to Michael Cimino's 'Heaven's Gate' (1980) - which widely signaled the end of this golden period of filmmaking. As Robert Altman p...