The Marvel Cinematic Universe: From Worst to Best

In honour of the release of Avengers: Infinity War I decided to rank all the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far (that I’ve watched), from my least favourites to the ones I could rewatch over and over. My absolute favourites are the most recent films, which I think reflects the success of Marvel’s …

The Crown

I’ve nearly finished watching the first season of The Crown and I don’t know what to say about it. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock the past few years, The Crown is a Netflix drama ostensibly about Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family, but which also acts as a kind …

Superheroes on screen, and why we should all watch Young Justice

A few weeks ago, the highly anticipated Justice League was released to a reception that was lukewarm at best. It made me think about the difficulties of trying to recreate a shared universe of any kind on screen, well as bringing to mind one of my all-time favourite cartoons- Young Justice. On the DCEU: it baffles …

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

*Spoiler-Free Review*   The phrase ‘confounded my expectations’ gets thrown around a lot, but truly, Blade Runner 2049 confounded my expectations. Given the standard model of the Hollywood blockbuster, action-heavy and emotionally-shallow (read: calculated to rake in the most cash), I was very pleasantly surprised when I found myself having to actively try to make …

Is Rick and Morty ‘proper’ sci-fi?

I was watching Irish people on YouTube react to Rick and Morty when one of them said something that stuck in my mind: ‘I don’t consider [Rick and Morty] sci-fi though’.  That got me thinking: what is it about Rick and Morty that differentiates it in the minds of the average media consumer from the …

Film Review: Dunkirk

I was slightly apprehensive going into Dunkirk. I was worried that I would feel bored as I had heard it was mostly action with barely any dialogue, that it would repeat the same war-movie clichés and exalt some kind of quasi-mythical patriotic British-ness that would totally alienate me. I forgot these worries within the first …

Simon Amstell: Carnage

I don’t know what I expected when I sat down to watch Simon Amstell’s Carnage, a film I had heard described as a vegan mockumentary of sorts that kind of made fun of vegans but also inspired people to become one themselves. As a vegetarian myself, I’m hyper sensitive to mockery of vegetarianism and veganism …

Hidden Figures

Who do you think of when someone says “NASA” or “space programme”? Most people would probably think of famous astronauts like Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, fewer people would be able to name the engineers and scientists that made their journeys possible and the names Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan would most likely …

Arrival

(spoilers) It’s rare nowadays that anything I watch is capable of capturing my attention for longer than twenty minutes, without my succumbing to the temptation of mousing over the video progress bar, opening another tab on my browser or checking my emails- I watch a lot of television on my laptop. Arrival proved to be …

Strong Female Characters

There’s been a lot of contention recently about the definition of a ‘strong female character’, which I find very interesting. It’s the kind of term that is thrown around a lot when speaking about the role of women in television and film, and it can become very easy to use it unthinkingly when critiquing the …