subtext

I love mystery shows, and I love improv comedy. Bringing the two together though - that’s a tricky proposition. Mysteries are generally highly scripted affairs, where you start with the end and work backwards laying clues for the viewer.…

The classic murder mystery has been making a resurgence in recent years, with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out one of the most prominent examples. This hasn’t been confined to just English-speaking movies, and today we’d like to look at a couple…

Over the last few years the Swedish Film Institute have blessed us with some amazing restorations of crime films from the 1950s. We previously looked at a collaboration between two giants of Swedish crime writing, as well as the first two…

Romance between humans and otherworldly entities is a common theme in fantasy dramas. It’s not hard to see why. It creates a natural tension, and it gives us a familiar emotion to ground us in an otherworldly story. Plus people like…

“Nordic noir” has been a popular genre in the English-speaking world since the 2000s, with the 2007 Danish drama The Killing’s breakout success a large factor. (In fact The Killing was much more successful in the UK than it had been in…

I love anime. Wait, no, that’s not quite true. I love what the artform is capable of, and I love many of the stories told through it, but I will admit there’s plenty of trash anime out there. A lot of anime started out as manga, and moving…

There are a lot of shows and movies from around the world that deal with different types of the living dead: zombies, vampires, and even stranger things. Writers like David McNally have drawn links between these monsters and people’s views…

A lot of history textbooks skip right over the period between the two World Wars as if little of importance happened in those two decades. Those that do mention them generally only hit the highlights - the death of Lenin in Russia, the US…

Happy New Year, and welcome to our Best of 2022 list. Or at least, our best “things I watched and haven’t already covered” list. There were a few good shows (like Tomorrow) that came out in 2022 and that we’ve already talked about. And…

It’s December, and all around the world people are getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Sometimes it’s easy for people in the English-speaking world to think that our version of Christmas is universal, but that’s far from the case. Even…