When you think of films about people switching bodies, your mind probably goes straight to Freaky Friday or 13 Going on 30. It’s a concept we’ve seen many times before but Swapped manages to make it feel fresh in its own way. Swapped is brilliant in its own right, marking Michael B. Jordan’s first animated feature since his Oscar win. Directed by Nathan…
Caroline Muirhead is an extraordinary woman though not in the way most stories would lead you to expect. This three-part limited series on Netflix (each episode running around an hour) begins like a modern love story before quickly descending into something far darker and more unsettling. At 29, Caroline meets Scottish farmer Sandy McKellar on Tinder, just…
“I have to betray them to save them.” Those words, spoken by Christine Marie, sit at the heart of this compelling and deeply upsetting four-part Netflix documentary series about the continued abuse within Utah’s Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints community. Christine and her husband, Tolga Katas, move slowly and carefully into the heart of the…
What would you do if your fiancée revealed, in front of your friends during wedding preparations, the worst thing they had ever done? In The Drama, this shocking confession becomes the catalyst for the film’s central conflict, as Emma admits that, at 15, she once planned a school shooting but ultimately did not go through with…
I haven’t seen many Michael Jackson documentaries before, and when he died I was too young to really understand everything surrounding him. I still liked his music, though, so watching this felt like filling in gaps I never properly explored. The title of this three-part BBC documentary raises a bigger question: whose story is it really telling? Is it…
When you watch a theatre show and you are completely absorbed in the production, thinking of nothing else, it becomes something special. This is one of those shows that I will think about for a long time. Watching Romeo and Juliet at the Harold Pinter Theatre felt like that kind of experience. For me, William Shakespeare is a hit and miss…
First things first. The Harry Potter film franchise was an integral part of my childhood, and this HBO-produced, mega-budget TV series feels too soon and too familiar to justify its own existence. The trailer landed yesterday and, while it doesn’t look bad on a technical level, the ghosts of its predecessors haunt every frame. It…
From 2013 to 2022, Peaky Blinders, created by Steven Knight, dominated TV’s crime drama landscape with its distinctive style and unforgettable characters. At the heart of it all was Birmingham’s Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), a war-scarred anti-hero who rose from the trauma of the First World War trenches to lead his family’s Romani-traveller crime empire. Despite his…
After watching the BAFTAs, it’s hard to ignore how nuanced and complicated this situation really is. There was a strong and justified condemnation of the slur itself but when Alan Cumming read a quickly prepared statement it all felt a bit rushed and thoughtless. He said at the end, “we apologised if you were offended,” it…
Most people tend to write off Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice as the awkward, slightly irritating sister, but The Other Bennet Sister offers something far more thoughtful. Here, Mary is given real depth, and much of that comes down to Ella Bruccoleri’s performance. She plays her with quiet intelligence and curiosity, and there’s a subtle wit to her…
