-an OD of Toughts-

 Right, you quivering jelly of sentiment, I've just staggered out of I Swear, this Tourette's gut-punch masquerading as a sob-fest. It's a lad with a mouth like a faulty shotgun, blasting tics at life's endless parade of bullies and buried hurts, while mum and mates cling on like limpets in a gale. And Christ almighty, it works – had me misty-eyed like a bulldog eyeing an empty bone yard. Plot That Crushes Northern kid wired wrong, swearing through schoolyard savages and soul-deep struggles, turning chaos into quiet heroism. No laughs here, just raw, moving truth – meaningful as a miner's lament, no sugar-coated slop. Like a sledgehammer wrapped in silk: brutal, beautiful, impossible to shake. Why It Stays With You Sod the blockbuster bilge; this is real stakes – tics as tragedy, triumphs as whispers. Moving enough to realign your cynicism, meaningful like a confession in the rain. Watch it, or admit you're the fool who irons socks. 9/10 – minus one for leaving ...

Right, I've just slogged through The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and don't get your hopes up for explosions or car chases. No, this one's a proper gut-punch: a retired everyman in inappropriate footwear trudging 500 miles across Britain to whisper hope to a dying friend. It's the kind of film that sneaks up, grabs your heart, and leaves you staring at the ceiling long after the credits, wondering if you've wasted your own life on beige routines. Plot: One Foot in Front of Regret Jim Broadbent's Harold Fry is your classic sad-sack pensioner—balding, beige trousers, a life of tinned soup and unspoken sorrows—until a letter from Queenie, his long-lost colleague fading in a northern hospice, flips the switch. Does he post a card? Pop on the train? Nah, this daft sod laces up yachting shoes and starts walking from Devon, convinced his sheer bloody-minded stomp will miracle away her cancer. Cue hallucinations of his tragic son, a gaggle of fame-hungry pilgrims ...

Right, let’s talk about this glossy nonsense called The Housemaid, the 2025 Paul Feig flick that’s hoovered up nearly $400 million by letting audiences gawp at pretty people turning a Long Island mansion into a human abattoir. It’s based on some airport potboiler by Freida McFadden, and Feig – the man behind Bridesmaids – has somehow turned it into a two-hour advert for why you should never, ever hire help when your wife’s got a track record of trying to drown the kids. Plot: Hoovering Up Trouble Millie (Sydney Sweeney, looking like she’s auditioning for a detergent commercial) is fresh out on parole for offing a rapist back in the day – fair play, says I – and bags a live-in maid gig with lawyer Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, built like a garden shed) and his nutcase wife Nina (Amanda Seyfried, eyes like saucers on springs). The attic door locks from the outside. Red flag? Nah, she signs anyway, because plot. Cue locked rooms, dodgy texts, a sweaty Italian gardener who looks like he’s smugg...

If there’s one thing television executives love more than ruining classics, it’s pretending they’ve “freshened them up for new audiences.” Which is exactly how we ended up with Young Sherlock—a series that takes the world’s most deductively dazzling detective and turns him into a moody sixth‑former with better cheekbones than sense.   It’s not that the idea doesn’t have promise. In theory, looking at how Holmes became the  Holmes could have been fascinating—like tracing a fine whiskey back to its first barrel. But instead, the show feels more like some well‑meaning attempt to explain rock‑and‑roll using an electric kettle and a PowerPoint presentation.   Every scene drips with the sort of self‑importance only teenage genius stories can muster. He broods. He smirks. He walks across cobblestones in slow motion as orchestral music insists that you must feel the intellect. Meanwhile, Watson isn’t even around yet, leaving our dear boy to mumble his deductions into Vi...

 We’re witnessing history unfold in the most jaw-dropping way possible. Iran is smashing American military bases to smithereens with such ruthless efficiency that the world can barely process it. This isn’t idle speculation—it comes straight from Alon Mizrahi, an outspoken Israeli journalist and peace activist who runs The Mizrahi Perspective on Substack, where he dismantles hawkish narratives with brutal clarity. Four Days of Devastation In a blistering four-day blitz, Iran has redrawn the Middle East’s military map by torching some of the planet’s priciest hardware. Think sprawling US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, decades of billion-dollar builds reduced to glowing embers faster than a stunt gone wrong. Mizrahi points out radars costing hundreds of millions apiece vaporized in seconds, entire installations abandoned and ablaze. It’s a humiliation the US hasn’t endured since Pearl Harbor, but this time it’s no sneak attack, it’s a sustained pounding. The E...

 People go on about how “diverse” the world is — different cultures, languages, religions, cuisines. Absolute nonsense. Everywhere is America now. You can fly ten thousand miles, step off a plane in Tokyo, Lagos, or São Paulo, and within five minutes you’ll find a Starbucks, a McDonald’s, and someone watching Netflix while ignoring you. The signs might be in a different language, but the smell of burnt coffee and processed cheese is exactly the same. The world hasn’t become connected — it’s been cloned. On the surface, it’s “vibrant” and “globalized.” Underneath, it’s the same operating system: one designed in a boardroom, wrapped in marketing, and pumped through a drive-thru speaker. And here’s the part nobody likes to mention: this isn’t just culture disappearing — it’s lives. In 1990, India’s heart disease rate was about 15%. By 2016, nearly double. That spike didn’t come from yoga and lentils. It came from clowns and burgers. The moment McDonald’s arrived, so did the heart atta...

No wonder young people are so annoying these days. Yes, they’d rather film themselves doing TikToks than find a job, but to be fair, I’d be bitter too if my first flat cost more than the GDP of Gozo. I’ve been meaning to write this for weeks, but honestly, it’s hard to put such a big mess into words. Still, let’s try, because maybe one of you geniuses might have a clue. Like most older folk, I look at today’s youth and sigh. Always holding a Stanley water bottle, always “raising awareness” about something new, and somehow everyone’s got “anxiety” so strong they can’t possibly work. Yet they spend their whole day editing videos in their car — that they don’t actually own. I keep hearing that a bunch of twenty-year-olds are “economically inactive". Translation: doing absolutely nothing besides taking selfies and arguing about “the system” over iced matcha. And if you tell them to find a job, they’ll tell you the problem is “the 1%” — as if taxing Charles & Ron will suddenly make...

Network, Sidney Lumet's 1976 scorcher penned by Paddy Chayefsky, isn't just a film—it's a Molotov through your telly screen. Peter Finch's Howard Beale, a sacked anchor who snaps on live TV with the eternal "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!", turns meltdown into ratings gold. Faye Dunaway's ratings fiend Diana Christensen and William Holden's grizzled newsman watch it all unravel into corporate porn. Cast Chews the Scenery Finch devours his posthumous Oscar as the swivel-eyed prophet ranting at the world's injustices, sweat flying like sparks from a dodgy alternator. Dunaway's exec climaxes over Nielsen spikes, pimping Beale's rage like it's Chateaubriand—Oscar for her too. Ned Beatty booms that primal corporate gospel, Beatrice Straight nabs hers in a venomous blink-and-miss cameo, and the whole lot snagged four statues total. A slow fuse to manic fireworks, sharper than a scythe through hay. Prophecy Th...

Some movies leave you speechless because they’re extraordinary. Then there are the sort that leave you speechless because you haven’t the faintest bloody idea what just happened. In the Blink of an Eye proudly belongs to the latter category — a film so convinced of its own brilliance it practically pats itself on the back for existing. You can tell this is one of those films right from the first minute. It opens with a mournful piano note, a sweeping shot of something cosmic, and a voice‑over muttering about time, memory, and destiny — which in movie language translates as: “We haven’t got a plot, but hang on, it’ll look expensive.” The Great Time‑Travel Soup The story — and I’m being generous calling it that — tumbles across three timelines. In one, a bunch of astronauts drift through space in a ship that resembles a high‑end Nespresso machine. In another, people on Earth are making grand speeches about connection and consciousness, as if TED Talks had invaded the apocalypse. And...

We Might Regret This is the sort of series the BBC normally commissions only after a three-year workshop on feelings, four diversity taskforces and a stern email from HR. Instead, someone clearly slipped through a script that’s filthy, sharp and actually funny – and then had the nerve to put a tetraplegic woman front and centre without turning her into a walking, talking charity appeal.   Freya, a thirty‑something Canadian artist who can’t move her arms or legs, moves to London for love and ends up in a flat that feels like a cross between a romcom and a care rota spreadsheet. She shacks up with Abe, a straight‑laced bankruptcy lawyer in midlife crisis mode, whose idea of danger is buying non‑refundable train tickets and dating someone half his age who uses a wheelchair.   Because life is cruel and social care budgets are apparently written on the back of a napkin, Freya needs a full‑time personal assistant and can’t find one who isn’t useless, deranged or both. So s...

This isn’t just a tiff between a judge and a Prime Minister. It’s the moment you lift the bonnet on Malta’s justice system and realise half the engine is held together with cable ties and hope. The way we pick a Chief Justice isn’t just flawed. It’s a joke. We pretend that the two-thirds rule in Parliament protects the courts from politics. Lovely. In theory, it forces agreement. In reality, it’s two tribes in suits haggling over which candidate will upset them slightly less. Not a wise choice. A least‑worst option. The noble language of “constitutional independence” quietly mutates into “Who can we live with without choking?” But a Chief Justice is not a flatmate. They’re not someone the parties merely tolerate. They should be someone the Republic actually trusts. When people start hearing that candidates are weighed by party reaction, TV optics, and internal loyalty charts, the problem isn’t the gossip. The problem is the wiring. The system is built so politics gets first dibs and ...

Watching Extras today is like walking into a pub that hasn’t changed the carpet since 1978—it smells faintly of regret and cigarettes, and you know something gloriously offensive probably happened there once. Ricky Gervais, in all his smug brilliance, created a show that poked every inflated ego in television’s fragile ecosystem. Celebrities didn’t cameo to look good — they came to be dismantled. Kate Winslet, Patrick Stewart, and Les Dennis—all handing in performances so self‑deprecating you wonder if they needed therapy afterward. The plot? Gervais plays Andy Millman, a man whose acting career makes Malta Public Transport look efficient. He spends each episode being metaphorically kicked in the shins by life, showbiz, and his own crippling sense of pride. He’s like the human version of a beige Chinese SUV — desperate to be interesting but doomed to embarrassment at every junction. And yet, amid all the social car crashes, Extras had a kind of savage honesty. It told us what we all se...

Right, they've unleashed this Netflix nonsense called How to Get to Heaven from Belfast and it's like someone took Derry Girls, shoved a dead body in the boot, and drove it off a cliff into the Irish Sea. Three mates—Saoirse, Dara, and Robyn—stumble into their idiot pal Greta's fake funeral in some bog called Knockdara, only to realise she's scarpered like a fox from a henhouse. Cue bumbling detective work across Ireland's drizzle, with gun-toting nutters, exploding cabins, and enough pink handbags to stock a drag queen's convention. Filmed partly in Malta, mind you, my backyard of sunburn and roundabouts. Spot the Westin Dragonara and Salini Resort pretending to be Portugal's Algarve, where these eejits splash about pools like drowning kittens while dodging assassins. It's recognisable if you've ever choked on a pastizz by the beachfront: sunny bollocks clashing with Belfast gloom, turning paradise into a farce of chases and chinwags. The Derry Girl...

 Every so often a television series arrives that doesn’t so much step onto the screen as stomp into your living room, kick over the coffee table and demand you pay attention. “Unfamiliar” is one of those shows, a strange, swaggering beast that looks like prestige drama but behaves more like a pub argument after closing time. On the surface, it’s simple enough: ordinary people suddenly confronted with events that make no sense at all – places that shift, memories that don’t line up, rules of reality that seem to have been written by a bored teenager with a malfunctioning laptop. Instead of brave heroes calmly “processing their trauma”, we get people reacting the way real humans do: badly. They swear, they panic, they make idiotic decisions, then double down on them with the grim determination of someone insisting their sat‑nav “must be right” while driving into a lake. Visually, the series is gorgeous in that slightly smug modern way: every frame looks like it’s been filtered throug...

 Right, let's talk about this absolute circus show from Robert Abela and his so-called "Board of Peace" nonsense. Trump's cooked up this megalomania-fueled fantasy club—pay your dues, kiss the ring, and pretend you're brokering world peace while ignoring the Palestinians getting steamrollered. It's like if I launched the " Board of Perfectly Tuned Aston Martins," but only for sycophants who chip in a million quid and ignore the clapped-out Fords rusting in the corner. Utterly disgusting, venal, and evil. What's new? Nothing. But Malta's nitwit Prime Minister just had to wade in with his size 12 ego boots. Abela starts yapping about an "informal" invite for Malta—like he's been personally WhatsApped by the Orange Emperor himself. Then he backpedals, says the format's "not ideal" (no kidding, you pillock), and now it's all vanished into the ether, like one of his government's scandals.  Was there ever a real ...

Right, buckle up your seatbelts, because Netflix, early January, lobbed this "His & Hers" bomb into our laps like a dodgy hand grenade with the pin half-pulled, and it's got more corpses per minute than a butcher's Christmas rush. Tessa Thompson's Anna is your classic ex-TV anchor turned suburban zombie, festering in Atlanta's armpit humidity with the ghost of her dead kid tap-dancing on her conscience – probably blaming her for that time she left the fridge door open. Then Jon Bernthal's Detective Jack, her ex-old man and walking midlife crisis, stumbles into their sleepy hometown of Dahlonega, where some poor cow had her head turned into pate with what looks like a lump hammer. Six episodes were binge-dumped because life's too short for weekly teases when you could be mainlining the misery instead. Plot: A Black Hole of Hilarious Horror Anna hightails it back home like a moth to a flame-grilled barbecue, poking her nose into the bash where her o...

There was a time when the BBC made programmes about lions, Spitfires, or men called Nigel quietly repairing dry stone walls. Now we have Small Prophets . Which, judging by the title alone, sounds less like a television series and more like something you’d buy from a crystal shop in Totnes for £14.99. “Handcrafted ethically sourced prophets, now in travel size.” But no. It’s a drama. And like many modern BBC dramas, it begins not with anything exciting — not a car chase, not an explosion, not even a decent punch-up — but with a lot of meaningful staring out of windows while it rains. Always rain. Apparently, Britain is now a permanent car wash. What is it about? The premise, roughly, is this: A group of ordinary people start experiencing “visions” — flashes of the future, tiny prophecies, whispers of what’s about to happen — and must navigate the moral, emotional and existential consequences of knowing things they really shouldn’t. Which sounds thrilling. Except it isn’t. Be...

There are two types of crime dramas. The first type involves handsome detectives, tasteful jazz music, and crimes so gentle they might as well be parking violations. The second type involves shouting, broken noses, and men named Gaz doing something extremely illegal with a van. Steal proudly belongs to the second category. And thank God for that. From the opening scene, it doesn’t ease you in. There’s no soft introduction. No “previously on” nonsense. It simply grabs you by the throat and hurls you into a world where everyone is tired, slightly sweaty, morally questionable, and permanently five minutes away from catastrophe. It’s less Ocean’s Eleven and more Ocean’s Eleven if everyone owed money to a bloke called Big Tony who keeps ferrets. The crew at the centre of it all aren’t masterminds. They’re not suave. They don’t own turtlenecks. These are the sort of people who plan a heist using a half-charged phone and a kebab receipt. And that’s precisely why it works. Beca...

Modern cinema has become a bit like a modern electric hatchback: clinically efficient, eerily quiet, and possessing all the soul of a microwave oven. You sit in the dark for two hours, watch a man in spandex punch a CGI cloud, and leave feeling like you’ve just spent the afternoon at a health and safety seminar. But then, along comes Sinners. And suddenly, it’s like someone has lobbed a live grenade into a library. Ryan Coogler hasn’t just made a movie; he’s bottled the humid, bone-chilling dread of the 1930s American South and spiked it with something supernatural and deeply, deeply angry. It’s dark, it’s visceral, and it has the kind of tension that makes you feel like you’re trapped in a lift with a Doberman that hasn’t been fed since Tuesday. However, we need to talk about the real star of the show. It’s not Michael B. Jordan—who, let’s be honest, is excellent, but always looks like he spends far too much time in the gym lifting heavy pieces of iron just for the hell of it. No. The...

I’m going to start with a confession. Usually, when I look back at things from 2008, I laugh. I laugh at the trousers, I laugh at the mobile phones that looked like oversized calculators, and I laugh at the idea that we thought a 1.4-litre hatchback was "sporty." But I’ve just started watching Fringe in the year of our lord 2026, and I’m not laughing. I’m actually looking over my shoulder to make sure a man in a grey suit isn’t about to erase my existence with a look of mild boredom. The 18-Year Head Start Watching this show today is like finding a copy of tomorrow's newspaper in a bin from two decades ago. In 2008, the writers weren't just guessing; they were basically looking through a telescope at our current lives. Take AI. Back then, AI was just a robot that said "Beep" and hit a wall. In Fringe, they were talking about The Observers—beings who had sacrificed their emotions for raw, calculated intelligence. Sound familiar? It’s basically what we’ve done...