By David Mazzucchelli I recently joined City Library in London and it has been a treasure trove of new books that I wouldn’t normally get my hands on, and this has been one of them. This huge hardcover (344 pages – it was a heavy book to bring back home…
Due to various circumstances, I stopped my monthly subscription to a certain cinema chain that allowed me unlimited watching of films on actual proper film screens, with noisy people using their smartphones and coming in late and everything. This meant that I didn’t see many of the films that were…
Although I’ve only written about the first Lego Harry Potter game, I have thoroughly enjoyed nearly all the Lego games. All three Lego Star Wars are great, both Lego Indiana Jones are very enjoyable, the second Lego Harry Potter game is expansive (if not as ‘fun’ as the first, what…
By Naomi Novik I have to credit Helen O’Hara, Deputy Editor of Empire Online, for her recommendation of this book; on the Empire podcast, when answering readers’ questions about what good books haven’t been adapted into film, she mentioned this book (with a description of ‘Napoleonic wars with dragons’) and…
Quentin Tarantino is a confident man – confident in his abilities as a film-maker, a scriptwriter, a salesman for his work, and the success of his place in cinema. It is what has allowed him to make relatively few films but at his own schedule, films that are overlong and…
I don’t know if it’s because I’m British or because my knowledge of history, and in particular American history, is fairly basic but I have been aware of Abraham Lincoln on a fairly shallow level. I know he was assassinated in a theatre, I know he freed the slaves and…
Everybody Loves Tank Girl #1–3 Written by Alan Martin Drawn by Jim Mahfood Published by Titan Books Since Tank Girl first appeared in Deadline back in 1988, the visual element of the character and the strips was the main appeal. I have some old Tank Girl comics but I don’t…
Written by Tom Tully Drawn by Joe Colquhoun Published by Titan Books This is the third handsome hardback collection of strips of Johnny Red from Battle in 1978 (I reviewed the first volume previously), compiling the storyline where Johnny ‘Red’ Redburn, a British pilot who ended up in Russia fighting…
By Mercedes Lackey I like to think that I’m fairly well read, or at least read enough about the areas I’m interested to have some knowledge of a wide variety of different genre-related materials, so it’s slightly embarrassing to admit that, before reading these books, I had never heard of…
Some belated notes on Skyfall, long after any discussion has finished so I could talk about it with some spoilers, just to get things out of my head. In an interview, Sam Mendes (the first Oscar winner to direct a James Bond movie) talked about the slight influence of The…