Archive

The Hunt

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Rosie Howells

Rating: 4.5/5 Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) is a gentlemanly father who, due to a lack of teaching work in his small Danish village, takes a job at the local kindergarten. Owing to an imaginative child and a jumpy co-worker, Lucas is wrongly accused of sexually abusing his best friend’s young Read more...

World War Z

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Rosie Howells

Rating: 3.5/5 World War Z is the sophisticated man’s zombie film, the fine malt whiskey to the rest of the genre’s pre-mixed orange and vodkas. Based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel of same name, production companies have been scrambling for the film rights ever since the book was published, Read more...

Man of Steel

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Baz Macdonald

Rating: 3.5/5 In the eight years since Superman was last on the big screen in Superman Returns, the film industry has gotten into superheroes in a big way. Whereas we used to see only one or two of these films a year, it now seems a week doesn’t go by without a new caped crusader hitting Read more...

Southern Comfort

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Kirsty Dunn

Ah, the Great Cheese Roll. The epitome of comfort food in all its toasted, cheesy, buttery, get-it-in-your-mouth-quick-before-it-runs-down-your-chin-y glory, these bad boys are the perfect antidote to a cold Dunedin eve. Not only are they tasty, inexpensive, and easy to make, they take pride of Read more...

App of the Week | Issue 14

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Raquel Moss

Google Reader is dead. Google Reader, that faithful web servant, which, for the past seven years, has fed me my web content. Its demise is a sad loss for we traditionalists who still get our news and read blogs via RSS. But all hope is not lost – hopefully, before its end, you exported your Google Read more...

Putting the Social Back in Social Networking

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Raquel Moss

Remember when social networks were new? And Facebook? Back when you could poke someone and gift them a picture of a flower … just because? It was exciting back then – social networks were revolutionising the way we connected with people. But what has that really amounted to? Facebook has become a Read more...

A Broader Perspective

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Charlotte Doyle

At the beginning of last year I was lucky enough to be taken to the United States by my parents, which involved traipsing around the Midwest and California for five weeks. Being avidly art-oriented, my mother has an incredible knack of finding galleries: take a very recent trip to the depths of the Read more...

E3 2013

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Baz Macdonald

The next generation of gaming is upon us. Despite industry assurance that the next generation of consoles would not hit the market until 2015, it seems that fierce competition between Sony, Microsoft and, to a smaller degree, Nintendo, have pushed that date forward a year. Nintendo launched Read more...

The Last of Us (PS3)

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Baz Macdonald

Rating: 10/10 The gaming industry is abuzz with anticipation surrounding the impending new generation of consoles and games, as am I (turn the page for my coverage of E3 2013). However, while we are all dreaming of what the next generation has to offer, the future of gaming is right before Read more...

Sigur Rós - Kveikur

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Basti Menkes

Rating: 4.5/5 Fairies. Fireflies. Icebergs. Rain. Learning how to fly. Whatever imagery people associate with Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós, there is a common sense of wonder to it. I’ve always likened listening to them to diving into an ocean, the way their music engulfs you and makes Read more...

Beady Eye - BE

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Basti Menkes

Rating: 2.5/5 There is no shame in not knowing who Beady Eye are. After a tumultuous relationship with brother Liam for the entirety of Oasis’ 18-year career, chief songwriter Noel Gallagher exited the notorious Britpop group once and for all in 2009. Intent on carrying on making music but Read more...

The National - Trouble Will Find Me

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Richard Ley-Hamilton

Rating: 3/5 With every listen of The National’s latest, I have become more and more conflicted. This time around, should I be expecting something refreshing and innovative from the Brooklyn quintet? Or should I be satisfied with something familiar, a more reassuring release? In brief, Read more...

Boards Of Canada - Tomorrow’s Harvest

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Basti Menkes

Rating: 4.5/5 No electronic composers affect me quite like Boards Of Canada. With but a few notes the Scottish duo can fill me with loneliness, nostalgia, dread, or a mixture of all three. Since their 1998 debut Music Has the Right to Children they have maintained a distinctive sonic Read more...

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Posted 6:05pm Sunday 7th July 2013 by Lucy Hunter

Mary Shelley, at the age of 21, published what is arguably the first science fiction novel; a fantasy story with a scientific rather than supernatural explanation. Shelley had apparently heard of recent experiments to “reanimate” corpses by making them jerk around with electric shocks, and dreamed Read more...

The Editor

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Josef Alton

Tales of obsession never lose their appeal. If there is a character’s flawed logic, actions ignited by the flame of desperation, and the smell of blood disrupting the logical flow of common sense, we the readers love to wait for the eventual calamity. Samuel Dansam’s The Editor reads like an Read more...

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires Of The City

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Basti Menkes

Rating: 3/5 A band like Vampire Weekend requires no introduction. Whether you’ve heard their hip blend of afrorock and indie pop intentionally or by accident, whether you’ve loved it or you’ve hated it – you’ve heard it. Their first two albums, 2008’s Vampire Weekend and 2010’s Contra, came Read more...

Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Basti Menkes

Rating: 5/5 “Let the music of your life give life back to music.” So go the opening lines of Daft Punk’s eagerly-awaited new album, Random Access Memories. It has been eight years since the French house duo’s last studio album and 12 since they revolutionised electronic dance music (EDM) with Read more...

Con Air (1997)

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Tim Lindsay

By the time Nicolas Cage (Cameron Poe) utters the moving line “I’m going to show you God does exist” and takes a bullet without flinching, Con Air has teleported us right back to the grand (but cheesy) days of the 1990s. Watching the archetypal Hollywood action thriller of its day is quite a Read more...

Invisible Ink? The Bastard Child of the Movie Biz

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Lyle Skipsey

If the modern day film industry mimics Shakespeare’s King Lear then the screenwriter is Edmund, the unloved bastard child, underappreciated but still vital to the plot. As Sunset Boulevard’s Joe Gillis said, “audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it Read more...

Metro: Last Light

Posted 3:03pm Sunday 26th May 2013 by Baz Macdonald

Rating: 9/10 Last year, THQ proved that even giants fall. In December THQ (one of the gaming industry’s biggest publishers with titles such as WWE and Saints Row under their belt) finally succumbed to the pressures of the economic downturn and filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. I still have no Read more...