Notes on the final ‘Fantastic Beasts 2’ trailer.

The final Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald trailer is here. Visually stunning, it pleasingly reinvents some awful clichés of cinematic dialogue, promises a subtle and maniacal performance from Johnny Depp and provides further, deeply-moving insight into the Dumbledore and Grindelwald dynamic. Unfortunately, it also leaves us with difficult questions that the film itself may not be able to answer, and that the Internet’s elephantine, erroneous accusations of racism may prevent us from asking in the first place.

Victor Frankenstein reviews ‘Mary Shelley’.

It was on a dreary night of November that I woke to Beelzebub poking me in the eyeball with his tail.

What it’s like to watch ‘Ekaterina II’ (Екатерина II) as a Beginner’s Russian Speaker.

Learning Russian is a different kettle of onions from learning French or Italian. First off, it takes you a month just to learn the alphabet (do not believe the idiot above). Second, once you start to read Cyrillic, you still read p as p, not r; or y as y, not u; or B as…

Who will survive ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8?

If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.

‘The House with the Stained Glass Window’ by Żanna Słoniowska (tr. Antonia Lloyd Jones): Book review.

History, pain and identity pile up like strata across four generations of Russian-speaking, ethnic Polish women in Żanna Słoniowska’s stunning novel of Soviet Ukraine, The House with the Stained Glass Window. The young, unnamed female narrator of The House with the Stained Glass Window (Polish title : Dom z witrażem) lives with her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother in the Ukrainian city…

‘Farewell, My Queen’ (2012): Review

Farewell, My Queen is maddening. It’s one of those films that has everything – a charismatic lead, a unique aesthetic, an interesting twist on the Marie Antoinette story that has the potential to reinvent it altogether – and then fails to do much with any of these things. The result is a mildly unconventional splash in a very large pond that creates a few ripples of mild, not-too-burning interest.