The purpose of the video essay format is to hook the viewer in with your personality; about welcoming your audience with the possibility of being your friend, your confident. But the opposite is true: I do not know you, I don’t know you to like you, I am remote and…

Last time I was struggling to care about Ahsoka. I left off last time equivocating over whether Ahsoka would achieve more in its eight episodes than a set of filmed warm-up sessions for some future cinematic release. Unfortunately, and really somewhat unexpectedly, it hasn’t. The events of the series, crafted…

Last time we picked up the tale of Ahsoka Tano, former cartoon. Look I’m sorry — I really am — but I’m struggling to care about Ahsoka. Despite my initial optimism, born of a desire to come to any work of art without preconception, in a state of pure innocence…

Way back last November I was talking about Andor and loose ends. It’s pathological at this point. I keep going back. Like every true Star Wars fan, all I want to talk about is this Star Wars that I don’t like (Obi-wan, you may recall). The signs were not promising…

This review was originally published on Letterboxd, but Superman: Solar was removed from that service. You can’t get mad at a fan film! It’s always nice to see people play the hits, and when Superman: Solar stays in that ball park it’s positively lovable. Much like the titular character, the…

Spoilers, naturally. Whenever someone asks me about Sherlock Holmes, I tell them the same (somewhat exaggerated) factoid: every single one of Doyle’s short stories about the famous detective concerns at least one character who has a dark secret from his or her time in the colonies. You can comically unravel…

Last time I thought a lot about sentimentality as Andor escaped from space-prison. This is how Andor leaves us for now, and it’s in a typically idiosyncratic fashion. These final two episodes are more of a coda than a climax, as…

Spoilers. Really loved this. Loved the confidence to open the film with an extended one-on-one interview with the main character to an audience, a move that could easily prove as cataclysimically boring as those events often are. Loved the inverted front-credits — the Avengers could never.

Last time we pondered the Gungan. Andor flickers back on forth on the boundary between being better treated as a serialised narrative and better treated as discrete stories, even accounting for the all-serial episode 7 which ended with effectively a prologue for this run. Having waited two weeks to watch…