-an OD of Toughts-

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 ...

  Remarkably Bright Creatures is the sort of film that arrives quietly, wearing sensible shoes and carrying a thermos, and then proceeds to make a far bigger emotional mess of you than any explosion-filled summer blockbuster ever could. It is a gentle, melancholy, and oddly funny Netflix drama that proves a film does not need to shout to be heard. In fact, this one mostly whispers, which is handy because it leaves more room for the octopus to do the judging At its heart, this is a story about grief, loneliness, and the inconvenient fact that other people sometimes matter. Sally Field plays Tova, a widow working at an aquarium, with the kind of calm authority that suggests she could organize a small nation using only a broom and a stare. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, a drifting young man trying to put himself back together, and Alfred Molina voices Marcellus, the octopus who may well be the smartest character ever to share screen time with us lesser mammals.  What Remarkably Bri...

There are television shows that politely ask for your attention. And then there are television shows that walk into the room, kick the door off its hinges, pour themselves a whisky, and remind you why British television still knows how to make proper drama. It  is one of those shows. Now, normally, modern spy dramas suffer from one of two problems. They either become unbearably clever, where everyone whispers in dark rooms while staring emotionally at rain-covered windows, or they become so action-packed that you forget whether you're watching MI6 or Fast & Furious with passports. Secret Service somehow avoids both.  Instead, it does something rather rare. It gives you tension. Real tension. The sort that sits on your chest like an unpaid tax bill. The story follows Kate Henderson, played brilliantly by an MI6 officer, trying to uncover a Russian asset buried deep inside the British establishment. Which sounds straightforward enough until you realise every character looks ...

In Malta, in 2026, being a normal salaried worker isn’t so much a career as it is a long, slow magic trick where your money disappears, and everyone politely pretends it hasn’t. On paper, the average salary is around €2,100 per month. Very nice. Very respectable. The sort of number that suggests you might one day own a sofa that isn’t emotionally damaged. And then, like a badly timed gear change, taxes, social security, and various bureaucratic nibbles take a bite. What lands in your bank account is more like €1,700 to €1,900. Which, in Malta, is roughly the financial equivalent of bringing a spoon to a sword fight. Now, if you’re a bright-eyed 25-year-old Maltese person who believes that renting a flat in Sliema or buying something respectable in Balzan is just “normal life", I have some news. It’s not normal life. It’s Formula 1. And you’re entering with a bicycle. A one-bedroom flat, nothing fancy, just somewhere your fridge doesn’t hum like a diesel generator, will cost you €1...

That question shows up under almost every post I write about artificial intelligence. A hundred times a week, in a thousand different versions. And it may be the smartest question in the entire AI debate. So smart, in fact, that it was asked long before ChatGPT, long before Silicon Valley panic, and long before “AI disruption” became a daily headline. Seventy years ago, in fact. The 1954 answer Cleveland, Ohio, 1954. Ford has just opened the first fully automated engine plant in history. A company executive is giving Walter Reuther, the head of the American auto workers’ union, a tour. Standing in front of machines that work on their own, he cracks a joke: “Walter, how do you expect to collect union dues from these robots?” Reuther doesn’t hesitate. “And how do you expect to get them to buy cars?” It’s hard to improve on that answer. In seventy years of papers, conferences, books, and panel discussions, nobody has come up with a sharper one. And yet the robots at Ford are still there. ...