'Since the Babylonians nearly 4,000 years ago, people have been making New Year’s Resolutions. Of late, they’ve become something to mock and are essentially considered these annual idealised promises you make to yourself that you know, deep down, you’ll never keep. It’s cutting out carbs and joining a gym, vowing you’ll write a diary entry [...]
'At this time of year, you likely see the same things as me. There are special holiday screenings of Home Alone (and, indeed, a remake now available on Disney+) and gifs of Will Ferrell dressed as an oversized elf screaming about Santa. There’s many an ad campaign utilising the recognisable (but incredibly creepy) note card scene in Love, Actually and [...]
'I can’t pinpoint precisely when these types of conversations began, but I can tell you when I first noticed their prevalence. I was sitting at my friends’ new dining table in the house they had just bought together. This couple had invited a few people over for an inaugural takeaway surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and [...]
In 1998, Elizabeth Wurtzel published Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. In step with the grungy brand of nineties feminism, the subtitle was intended to be confrontational; women are not meant to be difficult, and certainly should not be praised for being so – at least, so says the orthodoxy that flattens women because here, really, [...]
'A fox, sleek with an autumn colour and ears pushed back, froze when it saw me. It waited, assessing my threat level, and then appeared to soften. I opened my mouth to speak, to say hello delicately like I might to a dog or cat, but the word caught in my throat. It was as [...]
'ONCE EVERY FEW YEARS, the editorial sections of magazines introduce us to the “modern man”. At one time, this simply meant a man who thought his wife was a person and not an object Then it came to mean a man who merely groomed himself and took pride in his appearance (see: the rather ridiculously titled [...]
"A film like Jane Campion’s The Piano feels like it has always existed somewhere in my consciousness. Just like how I knew that deep water was dangerous and that the dark could contain horrors, I was always sort of aware that this film existed. Perhaps I saw images of Holly Hunter as Ada quite early on, her [...]
“The apocalypse appeared to have arrived and it was not yet apocalyptic,” Mohsin Hamid writes in his 2017 novel Exit West, “which is to say while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on.” The novel concerns a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, living in an unnamed Middle Eastern country that [...]
'Last week, as the 78th Venice Film Festival came to a close, Penelope Cruz received the Best Actress Award for her performance in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest melodrama, Parallel Mothers. In the film, Cruz plays Janis, a 40-year-old single mother raising a daughter in Madrid who receives some life-changing news, and critics have praised her performance as “sure-footed”, “astonishing”, and [...]
"In the autumn of 2017, I was sat around a table in a pub with about five or six friends. Aside from me, they were all female, and we had been sitting, catching up, for a few hours or so when the topic of the moment of that time came up: #MeToo. We were astounded [...]
Jon Paul Roberts 