Reviewed by Zoe Margolis Shot in a monochromatic, desaturated style, ANON offers a dulled vision of a near-future where no one has any secrets, or privacy. Unlike now, where people voluntarily upload personal information to social media platforms (or involuntarily, as is the case with Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of Facebook content), citizens of this society appear to have no choice as to how their data is accessed. Instead of mobile…
Read MoreFilm Review: Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
Joan Didion, the subject of this moving documentary now available on Netflix, is one of America’s greatest living writers. Her unsentimental, yet lyric vision surfaced in the essay “On Respect”, when she was a young sub-editor at American Vogue in the early 60s. Her voice was shaped by a childhood spent in her birthplace, Sacramento, California, with its ethos of small c-conservatism, a West conquered by heroic pioneers and a…
Read MoreFilm Review: Okja
Okja looks for all the world like a heartwarming family film about a little girl’s friendship with an adorable giant pig and that’s exactly what it is… for about twenty minutes. Director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) uses this time to lay the pipework of the plot. The multinational Mirando corporation has sent out 26 ‘superpigs’ to be raised by farmers around the world., After ten years, the healthiest and…
Read MoreTV Review: The OA
Review by Stuart Houghton A NetFlix Original series about a mysterious girl who arrives in the lives of some small town kids, seemingly in possession of strange powers and on the run from a mad scientist? Did Stranger Things prove so popular that NetFlix is now churning out identical shows in the hope that nobody will notice? The OA, which sidled onto the on-demand service’s December schedule with almost no preceding hype,…
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