Essay

LaLaLand: All That Jazz and Absolutely No Joy. Top Story - August 2026.
I wanted to love La La Land . In fact, for approximately five glorious minutes, I did. The film opens on a Los Angeles motorway, where an ordinary traffic jam explodes into colour, movement and music. Drivers climb out of their cars, dancers leap across bonnets and an entire gridlocked road becomes the stage for “Another Day of Sun.” It is bold, joyful and unapologetically theatrical. Here, at last, was a modern film musical that understood the sheer pleasure of the genre. It was not embarrassed by people bursting into song. It did not apologise for its choreography or try to disguise its sentimentality beneath layers of irony. It promised romance, spectacle and a little bit of magic.
By Millie Hardy-Sims3 months ago in Critique
Imagine There's No Imagine
So you remember when Imagine by John Lennon became shorthand for the greatest song ever written? I do. When it would be seen as nothing short of heresy to think anything to the contrary.
By Paul Stewart3 months ago in Critique
The Lights Went Out. Now What?. Top Story - August 2026.
In my not-so-humble opinion, most of the Eurovision songs are not strong enough to compete in a song competition. There. I said it.
By Cristal S.3 months ago in Critique
An Archaeologist's Review of Nolan's Odyssey. Top Story - August 2026.
As any archaeologist or historian will tell you, don't study our field unless you want to be angry or disappointed all the time. This joke is largely pointed to films, novels, and video games, all of which those of us in these professions still enjoy despite our seemingly contradictory reservations. The method most of us use is simple: we separate our acknowledgement of its value as entertainment from its historical or literary accuracy. As such, this is how I will structure my review in order to maintain fairness to Christopher Nolan and the entire cast and crew of his 2026 adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.
By Ian Read3 months ago in Critique
We Go Together?. Runner-Up in The Most Overrated Challenge.
Grease is the word, but it’s overrated. Yes, I’m aware of the number of people I’m about to offend. In the fifteen years that I taught choir and theatre, students would beg me to consider Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s raunchy musical about working-class teenagers navigating sex, romance, rebellion, and peer pressure in 1950s Chicago for either a movie day or a mainstage production.
By Laura Roodenburg3 months ago in Critique
The Alchemist and the Cult of Comfortable Wisdom
Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist has sold more than 150 million copies, been translated into over 80 languages, and inspired an entire genre of Instagram captions. It's routinely cited alongside genuine classics, gifted at graduations, and quoted in wedding toasts by people who otherwise don't read fiction. By any commercial or cultural metric, it's one of the most successful books ever written.
By Charles V Sasser Jr3 months ago in Critique
The Most Dangerous Propaganda Never Tells You What to Think
We are so deep in a media literacy problem that people don’t even really understand what media literacy means. Most people think media literacy means identifying fake news.
By Cindy🎀3 months ago in Critique
The Western Media Is Proving It's Propaganda
There was a point in my life where I stopped trusting that what I was being shown was simply information. I started to see it for what I think it actually is: propaganda, dressed up as neutral content.
By Brian Ka3 months ago in Critique
The Pixar Paradox
If my childhood can be summed up in one word, I think that word would be Disney. We had all the classics on tape, both official releases and a few bootleg copies my dad recorded from TV. Every movie back then was wonderful to me, immersing my mind in a world of color, music, and fantasy that is unmatched by any other today. The ones that stand out more than the rest, however, all carried the same name.
By Natalie Gray3 months ago in Critique
The Posthumous Author
Literary critics now regard Karol Sumner as one of the quiet chroniclers of ordinary European life during the unstable decades of the early twenty first century.
By Karol Sumner3 months ago in Critique
The Sun That Never Danced
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool." If someone told you that the Sun once danced across the sky, changed colors, zigzagged through the heavens, and nearly crashed into the Earth before returning to its proper place (as witnessed by tens of thousands of people) you would probably laugh; not because you're closed-minded, but because you've spent your entire life watching the Sun do the exact opposite.
By Jacob Herr3 months ago in Critique
An unheard story calling to be told
There are these emotional streams flowing in my head, but somehow seem to not cross into the land of words. Is there a word or a phrase for this?
By Prart R4 months ago in Critique