The Screen Scribe

Recommendation: Penny Dreadful

August 13, 2025

It is a rare series that feels like it was designed to be savoured in candlelight. Penny Dreadful is one of those shows, a gothic fever dream that takes familiar characters from classic literature and twists them into something unnervingly new. It is lush, theatrical, and unapologetically melodramatic, yet never without an emotional core. For…
Review: Ironheart

August 11, 2025

There was a time when the Marvel logo flickering onto your screen promised excitement, ambition, and cultural conversation for weeks. But that time feels like a fading memory now. Ironheart, Marvel’s latest Disney+ series, arrives with the limp inevitability of a direct-to-streaming release designed to fulfil contractual obligations rather than genuine fan demand. It is…
Recommendation – True Detective Season 1

August 6, 2025

There is a scene halfway through the first season of True Detective that plays out like a fever dream. A six-minute tracking shot snakes through a housing project in Louisiana as drug raids spiral into chaos. Gunshots. Barking dogs. Neon halos from broken floodlights. It is not just a technical marvel, though it certainly is…
Review: Fantastic Four – First Steps

August 6, 2025

In a franchise built on blueprints, Marvel has finally stopped following one. Fantastic Four: First Steps is not a reset just for the characters, it is a creative exhale. There are no blinking portals, no winking cameos, no characters appearing in clouds to tease Phase Ten. What we get instead is something that has been…
Review: The Sandman Season 2 – Part 2

August 4, 2025

Netflix says this was the plan. That the story was always meant to close here, quietly and on its own terms. But with the real-world noise surrounding the creator, Neil Gaiman, and the silent retreat from long-term commitments, the timing is… convenient. Whether this was truly the end by design or an elegant sidestep from…
Side Notes: And the Summer Blockbuster Winner is…..

August 1, 2025

There was something strange about the summer of 2025. You could feel it in the marketing. In the trailers. In the air-conditioned hum of multiplexes trying to make sequels feel fresh. Last time, I laid out the players. A Kryptonian reboot. A long-suffering superhero family. Another dino resurrection. A ballerina with a grudge. Now the…
Recommendation: Ace Ventura – Pet Detective

July 30, 2025

Some guilty pleasures are refined, subtle indulgences. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is not one of them. This is a film that charges out of the gate with all the grace of a caffeinated baboon and never once pauses to ask if its humour has crossed a line, or several. And yet, nearly three decades later,…
Review: The Sandman Season 2 – Part 1

July 28, 2025

There are shows that demand your attention with explosive spectacle, and then there are shows like The Sandman that whisper your name in the dark and invite you into a world of dreams, stories, and shadows. Season 2, Part 1 arrives after what felt like an eternity of waiting, and while the binge model and…
Side Notes: Why Ace Ventura and Charlie’s Angels Don’t Care About Woke Culture

July 25, 2025

Let’s get this out of the way: Charlie’s Angels and Ace Venture: Pet Detective (next week’s Recommendation) have aged about as well as a forgotten pot of yoghurt at the back of your fridge. One is a transphobic slapstick farce starring a human cartoon character; the other is a hyper-sexualised, male-gazey explosion of flip kicks,…
Recommendation: Charlie’s Angels

July 23, 2025

Some guilty pleasures wear their absurdity like a scarlet letter; Charlie’s Angels wears it like a sequinned jumpsuit while flipping through the air in slow motion. This 2000 reboot of the 70s TV classic is a film so unapologetically extra it feels like someone distilled late-90s pop culture, dunked it in glitter, and unleashed it…