True Detective 2. A mesmerising mix of Grand Guignol blood and violence and powerful emotional characterisation, Season 2 provokes both bewilderment at sudden, unfathomable plot lines and eyes-on-stalks tension as key events unfold. Fantastic credits with Leonard Cohen’s “Never Mind” growling over industrial decay, a uniformly brilliant evocation of a society whose toxic margins are… Know More

For everyone who wants more from a film, in particular an engagement with that prickly darkness that resides below every day consciousness wherein we dare to question how much freedom we actually have, then ‘Frequencies’ will be a delight. In a new book of aphorisms I am cooking in the oven there is one that… Know More

  It’s a pleasure to have a seriously challenging sci fi series on tv. Not the futuristic, philosophically hard-wired, Interstellar-style but creeping, unsettling daily life sci fi. We have two Roombas in this French house. They are programmed to come on and vacuum floors in the period between coffee in bed and being up and… Know More

  Under the Skin, with Scarlett Johanssen in a quease-making central role, underlines one of the age old adages of cinema – first class novels make second class films and vice versa. I’d read the book before seeing the film. The result was curiously schizophrenic. Watching the movie was overlaid by hovering images that had… Know More

Would you be happy if your child married an android?   When you meet someone new, your bio-chemistry does an autonomous evaluation: do I fancy her? is there something dangerous about him? will we get on? etc. The overriding sense of the interaction boils down to authenticity. Can I believe this other person enough to… Know More

    I’m much the same age as Bob Dylan and he has grown and changed beside and in front of me all my life … (I first heard his ‘protest’ songs a year after Russian ships approached Cuba and I had waited in panic for the US to broadcast a four minute warning to… Know More

    Like catching a big fish in a darkening lagoon just as you’re about to put away your tackle, I found Channelling on Sky Premier almost not seeing it breaking the surface. Unexpected. Hardly a review. Nothing on Rotten Tomatoes. No publicity. Winner of a minor London sci fi best film award 2013. But… Know More

    Our fingerprints, our retinal configuration and all else about us are unique, including our perceptions, dreams and fantasies. Even so we talk about being ‘normal’ as though it is a virtue. Society pressgangs us into conformity. To stray outside the fencing that society erects to herd us along the path of life is… Know More

How much do we sleepwalk through life, imagining that all is fine and it’s a blessing to be in the ‘free’ world? Meanwhile, what we assume to be a ‘democracy’ subtly and inexorably sucks the juice out of our liberties. Whether it be GCHQ mass surveillance a la Snowden, reduction in free legal support for… Know More