Reviews

Reviews

A Grisly Stephen King Film Adaptation Finds Hope Amid The Horror

Film review: The Long Walk In 1979, when Richard Bachman’s novel The Long Walk first released, it was read largely as a book reflecting on the Vietnam War: a conflict where young people were drafted and sent to their death with little sense of reason or purpose. The promised glory for the lone survivor at […]

James O'Connor · 17 September 2025

Reviews

The Black Comedy of Stalin’s Death and Its Aftermath

Review: The Death of Stalin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Black Inc. Books Joseph Stalin’s death was something of a ‘black comedy’, writes Sheila Fitzpatrick, and, indeed, it is treated as such in the 2017 film that shares its name with Fitzpatrick’s book. By 1953 Stalin was aged and was in the habit of subjecting his colleagues to […]

Nick Mattiske · 10 September 2025

Reviews

Nintendo’s Take On Wheelchair Basketball Is Exciting, But Slight

Game Review: Drag X Drive Drag X Drive is a unique prospect – a new launch-period game from Nintendo that centers around wheelchair basketball. Playing it requires a certain level of embodiment as you control it using the Joy-Con 2’s mouse mode, rolling both controllers across a surface to control your chair. It’s not the […]

James O'Connor · 10 September 2025

Reviews

Voices of Extraordinary Medieval Women Who Wrote Their Lives

Review: Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, Hetta Howes, Bloomsbury In the Middle Ages women ate, drank, slept, made love, had babies, worked, danced, prayed. They were daughters, wives, widows, friends, lovers and mothers. Less commonly, they were mystics and poets. It was rare for them to write about their experiences, […]

Nick Mattiske · 3 September 2025

Reviews

In Herdling, Leadership Is A Selfless Act

Game Review: Herdling I’m not sure how, why, or when one of the members of my herd in Herdling died. At some point in the second half of the game I checked my herd list from the pause screen and noticed that one creature – the second one I had found in the game – […]

James O'Connor · 2 September 2025

Reviews

Theology, Empire, and the Land: A Review of Decolonizing Palestine

Review: Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible by Mitri Raheb It could not be more timely to review Mitri Raheb’s Decolonizing Palestine. The situation in Gaza cannot be separated from what is happening to settlements on the West Bank. Raheb’s particular focus is on the Zionist practice of a settler colonialism that effectively […]

Assoc. Prof. Clive Pearson · 28 August 2025

Reviews

Eddington Finds A Way To Re-Examine 2020

Film review: Eddington 2020 – the first year of COVID lockdowns, social distancing, and global masking – was five years ago now, but the pandemic has altered many people’s sense of time in such a way that it feels much more recent. COVID-19, of course, never really went away, but enough time has passed that […]

James O'Connor · 22 August 2025

Reviews

Apocalypses and New Beginnings

Review: Apocalypse, Lizzie Wade, William Collins This book is about apocalypses and new beginnings, cities and civilisations collapsing and starting anew, of disasters and new worlds. We think of apocalypse as catastrophic ending, and Lizzie Wade describes it as such, but the book overall steers closer to the biblical and original meaning of apocalypse as […]

Nick Mattiske · 20 August 2025

Reviews

The Horror of Marriage Laid Bare in Together

In the Christian tradition we have always used the language of body horror to describe the implications of marriage. As early as in Genesis chapter 2 we read about marriage partners “becoming one flesh” – that’s an image that is completely at home in the same conversation as Cronenberg’s Videodrome or Brian Yuzna’s Society. Australian […]

19 August 2025

Reviews

Weapons Is A Thrilling Movie About Heavy Subjects

Film Review: Weapons At 2:17am one morning, seventeen children – all from the same third-grade class – get out of bed, open their front doors, and run out into the night with their arms outstretched. A month later, no one’s sure what happened, or where the children went, or why one child in the class, […]

James O'Connor · 14 August 2025

Reviews

A Rare Combination of New Tech and Old Sounds

Reviews: Nevertheless, Hammock | Translucent, The Choir Marc Byrd was once a member and producer of The Choir, and he wrote the popular worship number ‘God of Wonders’ (which, one assumes, was pretty lucrative). He was in the appropriately named duo Glassbyrd, with wife Christine Glass, which rode the wave of post-grunge Christian alt-pop. This […]

Nick Mattiske · 13 August 2025

Reviews

A Great Nintendo Character Finds New Purpose

Game Review: Donkey Kong Bananza As I loaded up Donkey Kong Banaza – one of the two big flagship Nintendo Switch 2 launch titles, second only to Mario Kart World in importance – I wondered how Donkey Kong would fare as a protagonist. Donkey Kong’s history within Nintendo games is an interesting one – once […]

James O'Connor · 12 August 2025

Reviews

Pop Culture, Patriarchy, and Power

A comparative review of three timely works :The Male Complaint by Simon Copland, Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert and Disciples of White Jesus by Angela Denker. These three books all, in their various ways, deal with a recent resurgence in Western culture of misogyny. They are not exactly fun reading but highlight an important […]

Nick Mattiske · 7 August 2025

Reviews

How Pilgrimage Changed the World

Review: Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World, Kathryn Hurlock, Profile Books The writer Samuel Johnson thought it showed a deficiency if people weren’t inspired by particular historical and religious sites, and it seems that there is a natural impulse in human beings to revere certain places and want to visit them, hoping to be […]

Nick Mattiske · 28 July 2025

Reviews

Marvel’s First Family Returns to the MCU with a Stylish but Shallow Reboot

Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps Fantastic Four: First Steps positions Marvel’s original superhero team in a 1960s-inspired world, with a visual style that immediately distinguishes it from the rest of the MCU. This mid-century setting brings some freshness to a franchise in need of reinvention. But while the aesthetic choices are deliberate and confident, the film often […]

Adrian Drayton · 23 July 2025

Reviews

Beauty and Belonging

Review: Together Alone (33 1/3 Oceania series), Barnaby Smith, Bloomsbury Ask someone only mildly familiar with Crowded House to name their most prominent songs, and they would probably give you ‘Weather with You’ and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’; it is unlikely they would offer anything from 1993’s Together Alone. Indeed, Barnaby Smith recalls a journey […]

Nick Mattiske · 18 July 2025