BY NICK PEARCE Rodger McPhail is a world-famous British painter, best known for his detailed wildlife paintings of sporting fowl, fish, and dogs. After studying at both Liverpool and Coventry Art Colleges, he achieved the rare distinction of having a painting published on the front cover of The Shooting Times at the age of just 19. With numerous exhibitions at The Rountree Tryon Gallery and … Continue reading An Artist by Nature
BY ANDREW MOODY If everybody in the post digital age were being honest with themselves, they would admit to using online pornography. With an ocean of porn flooding the internet, one popular genre is that of the CAM girl, where men pay a girl on screen to strip, masturbate, and flirt for tokens that can be turned into cash by the onscreen girl or her … Continue reading CAM
Back in 1999, two plucky, independent filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez released a strange, terrifying mockumentary called The Blair Witch Project at the Sundance Film Festival. The story concerns three documentary filmmakers who disappeared into the Black Hills in Burkittsville, Maryland, in 1994, their footage being found a year later. Around the time of its release, a deluge of horror films, including seventies and … Continue reading Post Blair Witch
BY ANDREW MOODY Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s 2001-03 mockumentary The Office is leaving Netflix on the 29th of June. Most people are familiar with the TV show, at the turn of the century this charming, hilarious (and very English) comedy hit pay dirt, and Gervais was catapulted to rockstar status. Now twenty years since it first hit TV screens, it seems like the right … Continue reading The Enduring Office
BY ANDREW MOODY If a critic can be of any value or use in today’s strange times, in my humility I offer that I have now read Sinead O’Connor’s new memoir so you do not need to. It is dreadful in the truest sense of the word, as if Laurie Penny had been a pop star. It is so bad, that I even complained to … Continue reading U Compare 2 Nothing
BY ANDREW MOODY In 2008, several years before either Game of Thrones or The Crown debuted on TV, Eric Bana starred as Henry the VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl, opposite starlets Natalie Portman and Scarlet Johannson who played Anne and Mary Boleyn. Now the movie has reached streaming service Netflix. After compulsively gorging on the first four seasons of Peter Morgan’s The Crown, I … Continue reading The Other Boleyn Girl
BY ANDREW MOODY During the Covid 19 pandemic and resultant lockdown in the UK, one of the few trades that continued on at pace was that of illicit drugs. New to Netflix is a six part documentary series The Business of Drugs that is equally educational to drug addicts and those who have never taken any illegal substance, as well as being a fascinating research … Continue reading The Business of Drugs
BY ANDREW MOODY There is something deeply compelling about Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2009 mockumentary Brüno, directed by Larry Charles, who he had collaborated with on the 2006 blockbuster Borat. Held together with an extraordinary performance by Cohen, who takes the Stanislavsky method to heights rarely seen before in cinematic history, what intrigues me after years of watching the movie is just how dangerous the film … Continue reading Brüno
BY ANDREW MOODY “When I was at my lowest, I was so grateful that people came to see me in the hospital and that people prayed for me…People I barely knew and some I didn’t know at all prayed for my survival. I know for sure that these people kept me alive. I am bathed in gratitude. It is for that and for them that … Continue reading The Beauty of Living Twice
BY ANDREW MOODY It will never be conclusively proven that billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. In the recent Netflix show Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (based on James Patterson’s book), the idea that Epstein was murdered in a prison hit, ordered from high above, is considered. It was in production nine months before his arrest on sex trafficking charges, and the film makers used the … Continue reading Filthy Rich
BY ANDREW MOODY When researching Stephen Pax Leonard, the author of the 2018 Conservative polemic The Ideology of Failure: How Europe Bought Into Ideas That Will Weaken and Divide It, I couldn’t find any reviews of the book. In my search however, I found articles from 2018 about Leonard’s unpaid Research position at Durham university being cancelled after he allegedly posted Antisemitic and Islamophobic tweets, … Continue reading The Ideology of Failure
BY ANDREW MOODY Woody Allen is not who I thought he was. In his new memoir Apropos of Nothing, the eighty something filmmaker candidly discusses everything in his long career, from winning four Oscar’s for the 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall to the molestation charges that have dogged him over recent years. He repeatedly writes that he is neither a genius or an auteur, simply lucky. … Continue reading Apropos of Nothing
BY ANDREW MOODY The problem as I see it is that you get young psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who are idealistic, having been taught at their universities that they really can make a difference. Then they come up against these guys in prison, and they want to feel that they’ve changed them……In a short time, the convict will know if the doctor has … Continue reading Mindhunter
BY ANDREW MOODY A characteristic common to all intelligence officers, East and West, is that they have a special open-mindedness. For them nothing is impossible, just because it is improbable. That’s a quote I’ve pilfered from the late Robert Anton Wilson, former editor of Playboy and co-author of the mind-bending conspiracy novel The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which I feel fits in perfectly for this review of … Continue reading Extraterrestrial
BY ANDREW MOODY “I’m mad on technology,” Adolf Hitler told a dinner party for his inner circle in 1942. Less than three years later and the Fuhrer was dead, Germany had surrendered, and as the dust settled on World War Two, more than sixteen hundred Nazi technicians had defected to America. A top-secret plan to win the arms race against Russia, who the US felt … Continue reading Operation Paperclip
BY ANDREW MOODY When I was in my early twenties, every Christmas I’d ask for a box set of my favourite TV shows. Before Netflix and online streaming, these box sets were the only way I could watch my favourite shows. One of these turned out to be Cracker. From 1993 to 1996, Robbie Coltrane starred in a groundbreaking police procedural tv show. As Eddie … Continue reading Cracker
BY ANDREW MOODY British filmmaker John Boorman (CBE) has seen and done it all. The director of Point Blank, Hell in the Pacific, Deliverance, Zardoz, Exorcist II: The Heretic, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General, The Tailor of Panama, Queen and Country. “What a life!” Harold Pinter said, “What a career!” Conclusions continues the story of Boorman’s vast experiences in filmmaking that began with Adventures of a Suburban Boy. Written when he … Continue reading Conclusions
BY ANDREW MOODY I may be a simple Kensington girl with a modest trust fund and a thirst for justice, but it is my destiny to guide your generation to a new world order. I’m like a younger, hotter, female version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and you are my rats. So writes everyone’s favourite ecosexual, socialist, trans-disabled, intersectional feminist, Titania McGrath, who returns … Continue reading #StayWoke
BY ANDREW MOODY The Manson Family murders in Los Angeles in August 1969 changed the face of Hollywood. The writer Joan Didion, later an enormous influence on LA enfant terrible Bret Easton Ellis, wrote that when she heard the news of the ghoulish killing of heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate: “I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverley Hills … Continue reading Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
BY ANDREW MOODY Film critic Mark Harris opens his epic Scenes from a Revolution: the Birth of the New Hollywood in 1967, two years before Peter Biskind’s iconic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Biskind placed New Hollywood’s arrival in 1969, with Dennis Hopper’s smash hit Easy Rider, the Manson Family killings, the chaos of Altamont, … Continue reading Scenes from a Revolution
