There's something very elemental in the idea of crawling into the back of a giant, fur-filled cupboard and finding it leads into a magical, timeless world. The sort of feeling, when you read it, that you kind of thought it up yourself when you were a kid, and someone else wrote it down for you. Which I think goes a pretty long way to explaining why a lot of people have a pretty strong connection w ...

Did I never tell you the story of why I stopped reading Harry Potter? Oh, it's a humdinger, check it out: So, being an Engrish teacher and very pleased that Harry Potter made reading 'cool' (and this was particularly odd in Taumarunui, where demonstrating any form of intelligence was usually rewarded with brutality), I decided that, in the interests of keeping my finger on the pulse of popular cu ...

Looking back over the films I've reviewed in this rapidly closing year (all 21 of them! That's like two a month. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?), I seriously wonder if any of them is as good as The Constant Gardener, which is uniformly excellent from beginning to end. I can't really tell you much about the plot because the very first thing to happen in the film is an enormous spoiler that I ...