• Reluctant Yet Obligatory Review of the Year: 50 Shades of Grey

    February 19, 2015 - By 

    It’s hard to imagine anyone leaving their cinema seat after Fifty Shades of Grey feeling truly satisfied. Certainly not people like me, who had followed the on-set bust ups and disastrous pre-release press tour with some amusement and turned up hoping to see a hilariously terrible turkey. In fact, the movie is entirely well-made – it’s just well-made to a fault. This a cold, sterile piece, over-produced to within an inch of its life and with no semblance of real human sentiment or emotional weight that should come in a film that entirely focuses on a complex romantic relationship between…

  • American Sniper

    January 22, 2015 - By 

    American Sniper is one of the most grotesque films I’ve ever seen. A blatant piece of flag-waving Bush-era US propaganda, it’s a war movie where 100 dead Iraqis do not equate to one dead American. Where all brown people – children included – are enemies of ‘freedom’. Where the United States is a glossy land of BBQs, rodeos and pretty wives, and the Middle East is an “evil” pile of “dirt” populated by “savages”. These are expressions used by US Navy Seal Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), a skilled sniper who, over a lengthy military career, racks up a body count in the hundreds from behind…

  • Rick Ross – Mastermind

    March 21, 2014 - By 

    Rick Ross’s sixth album Mastermind arrives to little ceremony. Throughout its promotion the usual rattle and hum of the internet hype machine has remained eerily silent for an artist considered to be among rap’s elite. Ross has always sold buckets of records and his fourth album Teflon Don – released in 2010 – granted him large scale critical acceptance that legitimised his ascendancy to hip-hop’s head table. But the past couple of years have stifled a career rise that once seemed so unstoppable. The Miami native’s recent misdeeds include some unfortunate lyrics that attracted accusations of condoning date rape, the termination of his…

  • The Weeknd – Kiss Land

    October 14, 2013 - By 

    When Abel Tesfaye mysteriously emerged two years ago with a dazzling set of ice cold mixtapes that vividly depicted post-breakup anxiety, lurid sexual encounters and drug-enhanced paranoia, the impact of his music was only heightened by the ambiguity surrounding the artist. Preferring to lurk in the shadows of promotional imagery (or not appear at all) and presenting himself under the peculiar misspelled guise of The Weeknd, the faceless Ontario native leaned on his piercing falsetto to lure listeners into his desperate and debauched world. While Tesfaye may have crept to the spotlight over time by breaking his anonymity, performing live,…

  • Kanye West – Yeezus

    July 1, 2013 - By 

    Yeezus is Kanye West’s most polarising album to date, and it’s not just down to the testing sonic wonderland he’s created from such anti-pop genres as Chicago drill, house and industrial. Detractors who charge West with accusations of egotism, narcissism  and a bloated sense of self worth are unlikely to tolerate the most confrontational and aggressive piece he’s ever made, with topics such as power, materialism and a creeping distrust of women on Ye’s increasingly insular agenda. Inevitably, deriving enjoyment from Yeezus comes down to whether you can endure what’s on the mind of the man who in a recent…

  • Styles P – Float

    May 21, 2013 - By 

    The nineties resurgence sweeping New York hip-hop has primarily been forged by artists born right in the middle of the decade, but with boom-bap beats fashionable again it was only a matter of time before some older statesmen made a fresh run for relevance. Yonkers rapper Styles P has seemingly been around forever as both a solo artist and member of The LOX. But while Styles goes back far enough to have shared a label with Biggie, he’s always been playing catch up in a career full of missed opportunities and false starts. The LOX never really got going on…