Another war It was one of the swiftest military reversals of the twenty-first century. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh had been a point of often violent contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Its population was mostly ethnic Armenians, yet it lay inside Azerbaijan surrounded by areas with Azeri majorities. The two nations had fought wars over the area from 1988 to 1994, briefly in 2016, and then again in 2020, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. An Azerbaijani blockade then pushed the region to the brink of famine. Surprisingly, given that it was such ..read more

Obligatory preamble As seems to be traditional by now, the caveats to all of this are: For the purpose of this list, a show counts as a 2023 show if the majority of a season was released in the UK this calendar year. I’m just a guy watching shows while eating dinner after work, not a professional critic. Hence, there are heaps of stuff that people rave about I’ve not seen. I am writing from my own perspective with my own taste. Hence because I can’t bear second-hand embarrassment, I haven’t managed to watch a full episode of Succession even though I’m sure everyone who says it’s amazing is ri ..read more

A friend recently sent me a post by David Goodhew about the latest figures on attendance at Church of England ceremonies. It’s as interesting as it is depressing. His primary focus is on how Covid has emptied out pews. However, as he makes clear what the pandemic did was at most accelerate and deepen a long-standing and apparently remorseless trend. In 2000, usual Sunday church attendance across C of E congregations was 950,000. By 2022, it was 549,000. That’s less than 1% of the population of England worshiping weekly with our national church. That actually understates the extent of the prob ..read more

[Spoiler-free] I have seen the future of animation and it rocks! On Thursday, I dutifully shuffled down to my local Odeon to see Spider Man: Across the Spider-verse. There, I found myself in the busiest screening I’ve been to since before Covid, with possibly the most engaged audience as well, watching what I am confident it is the most compelling superhero film since at least Endgame and perhaps the best animated film since Inside Out. It’s a bravura display. That’s most evident in how it looks. Its Oscar winning predecessor, Into the Spiderverse, was a milestone for innovation in animation ..read more

Polite Society is the funniest, most gonzo film of the year so far There exists a sub-Reddit devoted to technically accurate but, nonetheless, deeply misleading summaries of film plots. For example, “teen ruins younger sister’s chance of appearing on national television” for the Hunger Games. It would be a struggle to write something similar for Polite Society. Largely because the film got there first.  The plot follows Ria, a secondary school student from Shepherd’s Bush, alarmed that her big sister, Lena, has agreed to an arranged marriage. Despite the rest of her family’s delight, she ..read more

Watching John Wick: Chapter 4 is a bit like coming across a jewel made up of huge diamonds held together by Sellotape. If that sounds like a rather lukewarm endorsement, it isn’t necessarily so. For a decade, the Wick franchise has been the Bolshoi of action cinema. Even relative to those already high standards, the numerous fights, shoot outs, car chases, and blends thereof in its fourth instalment are a dramatic step up both in scope and style. In particular, the film culminates in an extended, constantly mutating sequence which seems to span the whole of Paris. It starts as a fairly standa ..read more

Light spoilers for Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania but full spoilers for the rest of the MCU up to that point I spent much of Marvel’s phase 4 remaining enthused about the MCU as a lot of people – including it seems the majority of critics – turned sour on it. Well the good news is that with the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the start of Phase 5, I’m no longer on a lonely island proclaiming that Wakanda Forever was actually the best film of last year. The bad news is that this is because I found Quantumania deeply underwhelming. In the third Ant Man film, when Scott Lang ..read more

This has been a slightly odd year in cinema. Covid related production delays and studios still figuring out how best to combine releases in cinema and on streaming services. Indeed, this got downright frustrating at times. For much of the summer and autumn, it felt like not only was there nothing good to watch, but there wasn’t really anything to watch full stop. This is perhaps reflected in the fact that four of my bottom five films of the year came out in between April 1st and September 31st. By contrast, only two of the films in my top 10 came out in that six-month window, and one of those ..read more

A pet hate of mine is the extent to which our culture conflates being a ‘book lover’ with being really into novels. This view tends to erase the literary merit of non-fiction. I would submit that the ten books on this list, all of them non-fiction, illustrate that nearly everything one could want from a novel can be found in non-fiction. There are compelling narratives that transport us through time and around the world: from our emergence as a species, to a China fighting its way out from under imperial domination, to the coffeeshops of Vienna during its heyday as the intellectual capital of ..read more

News and politics Probably my favourite discovery of year has been the Ballot Box. It is essentially, a tour of elections around the world hosted by a trio of political scientists. It has a number of distinct appeals. Firstly, understanding an election outcome generally means having some grasp of the place where it happened’s history, social divisions, constitutional setup and most pressing issues. So, it functions as a good introduction to many of the countries covered. As well, as going deeper on races which were heavily covered in the English language press, such as the French and Brazilia ..read more