-an OD of Toughts-

My name is Michele. I'm 39 years old. It was a rainy Tuesday in November, six years ago. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I was called into the owner's office. I worked as a sales representative for a hotel supplies company. They didn't even offer me a coffee. My boss gave me the usual slimy speech, full of corporate buzzwords like "downsizing", "necessary cuts", and "difficult decision". In plain English, it meant, "You're fired, effective immediately. You have half an hour to clear your desk." By exactly 4:00 p.m., I was standing on the pavement in the pouring rain, holding a cardboard box that was slowly falling apart. Inside it were my Star Wars mug, two diaries, and a stapler. I was 33 years old, had just taken out a mortgage, and had no idea what I was going to do next. I couldn't bring myself to go home. I felt like a complete failure. So I walked into the first open place, a small neighbourhood bar. One of those depressing pl...

Every time a headline pops up claiming that "young people just don't want to work in kitchens anymore", a very specific memory comes flooding back. Imagine being 19 years old, fresh out of culinary school with a massive hunger to learn. You land a job at a high-volume restaurant, working a blur of 16-hour days, 7 days a week. At the end of your first month, you take home €1,400. Thirty years ago, if a 19-year-old took home the equivalent of €1,400 a month, they were laughing. It was genuinely great money for a teenager starting out. Back then, the brutal hours felt like a fair trade for financial independence and a solid foot on the ladder. You could buy a house, live comfortably, and actually build a future. But three decades later, the wages have stagnated while the cost of living has skyrocketed. Today, offering that same kind of compensation for back-breaking labour isn't a tough rite of passage anymore—it is simply corporate greed and modern-day slavery. This sh...

There are films you watch. Then some films grab you by the collar, throw you into a DeLorean at 88 mph, hand you a lightsaber, a Rubik's Cube, and an Atari joystick, and say, "Good luck keeping up."  Ready Player One isn't just a film. It's a full-throttle assault on your childhood. Steven Spielberg somehow managed to make a movie that feels like spending Saturday morning in the 1980s while simultaneously living in the year 2045. Every frame is a treasure hunt. Blink, and you've missed something. Pause it, and you'll probably find five more things. Watch it a second time, and you'll discover that the thing you thought was an Easter egg was actually hiding another Easter egg behind it. The opening race alone is enough to make any self-respecting geek spill his drink. The DeLorean from Back to the Future . The Batmobile. Akira's motorcycle. King Kong trying to flatten everyone. The T. rex from Jurassic Park reminds us that dinosaurs still haven...

Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed sounds less like a television series and more like something scribbled on the side of a van that has definitely been parked behind a nightclub since 2008. Yet somehow, against all odds and common sense, it turns out to be a cracking little thriller — all blackmail, murder, moral panic, and the sort of suburban chaos that makes you think every school gate conversation should come with a warning label. At its heart, the show is about a newly divorced mother who stumbles into a nightmare involving a cam boy, a suspiciously large amount of bad decisions, and youth soccer, which is apparently now one of the world’s most dangerous criminal ecosystems. I don’t know who came up with that premise, but they deserve either a medal or a very long sit down with a therapist. It’s the sort of plot that starts as “just one tiny mistake” and rapidly becomes “oh no, the entire police force, a couple of corpses, and everyone’s dignity are involved now.” Tatiana Maslany is terr...

Obsession is the sort of indie horror film that sneaks up on you, taps you on the shoulder, and then proceeds to rearrange your thoughts for the next hour. I’m not even a horror fan, which is rather like saying I’m not keen on being chased by a swarm of angry hornets, but this film had me hooked from the opening stretch and never once gave me the luxury of switching off. It does not merely aim to unsettle you. It lingers, it nags, and it leaves a rather nasty little splinter in your brain. What makes it so effective is that it does not behave like a cheap scare machine. It is not interested in shouting “boo” every five minutes like some theatrical brat demanding attention. Instead, it builds something slower, stranger, and much more intriguing. It takes a premise that sounds almost familiar, then twists it until it feels deeply wrong in a way you cannot quite explain. And that, frankly, is where the film becomes dangerous in the best possible sense. There is a point in Obsession where ...

There are moments in history that expose what power really looks like. Not when it's smiling for cameras. Not when it's shaking hands or making speeches. But when it is frightened.   Because frightened power doesn't argue. It silences. On a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, one woman became something the most powerful men in the country could not control. Her name was Daphne Caruana Galizia. She wasn't backed by an empire of newspapers. She didn't command an army of reporters. She sat at a desk, opened a laptop, and wrote. That was enough. Enough to make ministers lose sleep. Enough to shake governments. Enough to terrify men who believed themselves untouchable. Malta is small. Everyone knows everyone. Secrets don't stay hidden for long. Unless the people keeping them have money, influence, and power. Daphne made it her life's work to drag those secrets into the light. Every day, she published investigations that named politicians, businessmen...

Over My Dead Body is the sort of film that turns up late, talks too loudly, and somehow still ends up being the most entertaining person in the room. It is messy, mean, and often ridiculous, but that is also part of its charm. For all its bad behavior, there is enough energy here to keep you watching. The plot barrels along like it has lost the brakes and decided not to worry about the consequences. Characters make terrible decisions, situations spiral out of control, and the whole thing leans hard into chaos. In lesser hands, that would be a disaster. Here, it feels almost deliberate, like the film knows exactly how daft it is and is having a laugh at its own expense. What makes it work is the attitude. It does not ask to be admired for elegance or subtlety. Instead, it aims for mayhem, blunt jokes, and just enough wit to keep the whole thing from collapsing completely. That gives it a rough-edged personality that is hard to ignore, even when it is behaving like an absolute nuisance. ...

Clara was thirty, and by then Tinder had begun to feel less like a place where people met and more like a waiting room with worse lighting. The questions were always the same, the faces strangely interchangeable: blue shirt, polite smile, and carefully phrased boredom. “What are you looking for here?” they would ask, as though she were a misplaced object rather than a person. Then Leo wrote. He was, at first glance, disarmingly ordinary. No crude jokes, no theatrical charm, no unnecessary mystery. He seemed to understand the radical value of not trying too hard. They agreed to meet on Thursday. At five that afternoon, her phone lit up. “Clara, I need to make you an indecent proposal. And no, not in that sense. I’ve just found an original 1980s bar foosball table for fifty euros. The seller is moving tomorrow at dawn, and if I don’t collect it tonight, it’s gone. I’ve rented a van. Our aperitivo is cancelled—unless you feel like forty minutes on the ring road with me, helping me load it...

These days, most superhero shows arrive with all the excitement of a tax return. Lots of CGI, lots of speeches about feelings, and enough multiverse nonsense to make your head spin faster than a washing machine full of bricks. Then along comes Spider-Noir. And suddenly, someone at the television factory remembers how to make something interesting. Set in a rain-soaked, smoky version of 1930s New York, it feels less like a superhero show and more like a detective novel that got into a fight with a comic book and somehow won. The city is dark, corrupt, and about as cheerful as a Scottish winter. Perfect. The real star, however, is the mood. Every scene drips with atmosphere. Shadows lurk in every corner, jazz slithers through the background, and the whole thing looks like it was filmed through a glass of whisky and cigarette smoke. And that's what makes it brilliant. Spider-Man has always been a wisecracking kid swinging between skyscrapers. Spider-Noir is something entirely differen...

Right. Let’s get one thing straight. I don’t normally go in for sentimental television. I prefer my entertainment loud, slightly dangerous, and preferably involving an engine somewhere. But Only Child managed to sneak past all my defences and hit me right in the chest like a shopping trolley with no brakes. This little Scottish sitcom is heartwarming, hilarious, and wonderfully human. And honestly, any show featuring a man driving around the Highlands with a child-size doll called Percy strapped into a motorcycle sidecar already deserves some sort of cultural award. Set in Forres in Moray, the series follows Richard Pritchard (Greg McHugh), a struggling actor from London who heads back home after the death of his mother to check on his widowed father, Ken (Gregor Fisher). Richard clearly expects a quick visit and a fast escape back to civilisation. Instead, he finds his dad slowly descending into glorious eccentricity — hoarding sausage rolls at funerals, shouting at cats, storing bi...

Let’s begin with a cheerful little statistic. In Malta, roughly one in three bars is allegedly involved in money laundering. Restaurants? About three in ten. Which means that if you’re sitting in a quaint little restaurant in Valletta, admiring your €18 plate of indifferent pasta, there’s a fair chance the spaghetti isn’t the main thing being processed. Now, because this has clearly evolved into something resembling a fully fledged economic sector, I thought it only fair to offer a helpful guide. Particularly for those bright‑eyed dreamers who’ve always wanted to open a restaurant despite having absolutely no idea how food—or business—actually works. Good news: you don’t need to. Step one: get the cash And not the nice, clean, tax‑paid kind. No. You need the sort of cash that arrives in bags, not bank transfers. Plenty of it. According to widely cited figures, the cocaine trade alone in the Maltese market feeds hundreds of millions into circulation annually. So supply, as they say, is ...