endearing

It's challenging to convey the immense cultural impact of The Lord of the Rings trilogy to those who didn't experience it firsthand. The movies, released annually from 2001 to 2003, became a colossal phenomenon. Despite the current abundance of Tolkien-related content, with Amazon’s Rings of Power being renewed for a second season and more Rings movies around the corner, the original trilogy holds a special place in my family's heart. For three consecutive years, we made it a holiday tradition to head to the cinema in…

The Trailblazer sure is getting a lot of love from fans Honkai: Star Rail has been out for just about a week now, and already, fans have started to create things around it. Art and memes have already been flooding social channels. And in a turn that surprised me a bit, the Trailblazer—the main character chosen by the player—is getting quite a bit of attention. In Honkai: Star Rail, you assemble a party of adventurers and explorers to travel across the stars, dealing with the ever-present Stellaron threat. As you travel…

In the post-Spice Girls pure pop boom, the all-singing, all-dancing S Club 7 came to epitomise a certain turn of the millennium optimism. Their songs were peppy, sugary and loaded with gleeful generalities about reaching for the stars and forgetting about your cares. For the majority of their lineup, and for most of the pop stars at the time, landing a place in a pop act was the fulfilment of a childhood dream, or the perfect chance to escape a mundane job. S Club member Bradley McIntosh, for example, was working in a…

Hoping to sustain a recent mini-resurgence of Hong Kong films through to lunar new year, Ying Chi-wen’s second feature is a silly, initially laboured but increasingly endearing comedy mashup. A remake of 2021 Taiwanese gangster film Treat or Trick, which is itself a do-over of 2004 Korean horror-comedy To Catch a Virgin Ghost, it manages to hit virtually every branch on the genre tree on the way down: Bad Boys buddy action comedy, dead wet girl Asian horror, knockabout Beijing opera farce, wuxia parody.Yau Shing (Hong…

Playdates used to be a chance for parents to get a break while their kids were off with another family. Not anymore. Lately they have become orchestrated events where every moment gets captured and shared. Parents expecting a bit of peace and quiet instead get a constant buzz of smartphone alerts. Here are Jimmy and Bobby making crafts! Here they are decorating cookies! Look, now they’re building a fort! Why do we do this, and what does it say about modern parenting? Many moms—and yes,…

This charming if decidedly silly sci-fi love story unfolds in a near future where clothes and home furnishings look much like the stuff we have today – while some of the tech equipment the props department came up with looks like the prizewinners at a primary school art fair. For example, there’s a headset people can put on as they go to bed, a mass of wires and twinkly fairy lights, which stops invasive advertising (designed to implant the desire for fried chicken or soft drinks) getting into the sleeper’s dreams.…

Film: Where the Crawdads Sing Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Taylor John Smith, Harris Dickinson, David Strathairn, Michael Hyatt, Sterling Macer Jr., Logan Macrae, Garret Dillahunt, Jojo Regina Director: Olivia Newman Rating: * * * Runtime: 125 mins This screen adaptation of Delia Owens’ 12 million copies selling novel ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’, scripted by Lucy Alibar and directed by Olivia Newman, is a worthy one. It has a coming-of-age story intermingled with intrigue, young muddled romance, and a…

Emergency, a comedy thriller about three college friends – two Black, one Latino – navigating a downpour of bad optics and decisions, traffics in several established lanes: the raucous one-last-epic-party romp a la Booksmart, where everything that can escalate will in the course of a single night; the hijinks-filled buddy road trip comedy albeit this time around campus; and the socially aware thriller in the shadow of Get Out, where every move is weighted by the looming threat of anti-Black racism in America. In other…