Sister Midnight

A quite startling and surreal viewing experience by Karan Kandhari

Fashioned from influences ranging from Wes Anderson to stop motion animation, the film is a rare beast in that it makes no apologies for the forthright nature of the lead female protagonist. She has been ushered into this world of one she does not want to be in, yet through grit and gumption (much like early Capra heroines) she grows into her role as a domestic goddess in spite of her plight and lot in life. Lumbered with a husband who is no help whatsoever, she becomes a beacon in the community and admired by women who share the same problematic life and grows towards her husband.

In a great year for cinema from the sub-continent (All We Imagine As Light and Girls will be Girls), these are films of universal themes that are attractive to western audiences with moments of hilarity and subtlety that would not look out of place in Apatow comedies. This along with the utilising of western music (Buddy Holly for consumation anyone), at times surprising yet equally refreshing, with the director picking the brain of Jim Jarmusch seemingly.

Anchored by a noteworthy central performance by Radhika Apte, which is both vulnerable and affecting; she grows more and more misanthropic with her behaviour become more manic which subverts the audience anticipation

Sister Midnight is a film that is light with moments of darkness attempting to seep in, but one that reminds you of the power of human imagination amidst painful moments of loneliness and isolation. This is a film that is not the restrained human drama you expect, instead a free-spirited view of a brave new world available to a burgeoning sub-continent.

When the twist of the film occurs, the pathway of the film alters to a second journey for the women as she seeks a new path to discover. If the film is flawed it is the use of animated animals to depict the emotional psyche of the woman's state, it falls down on this trope because the caustic humour of the film's first hour is lost sadly.

However, the bold and brave style of performance and aesthetic should hold this film in good stead to garner a wider critical response and cult following due to its very nature of being something you have never seen before yet embracing influences of world cinema from Wenders to Ozu.

This has already garnered a Best British Film Debut nomination at the Baftas in February for the director in a highly competitive category. As well as being nominated for Camera D'Or in Cannes last year

Sister Midnight is out on 14th March from Wellington Films

Pax and the Secret Swarm

 

Final book in the Pax trilogy by David Barker

David Barker is a prolific writer, whose first published books were about the threat of global warming and the impending threat of water and eventual lack of it in three books that were scientific thrillers.

Following that successful publication run, he has turned his head to young adult fare in the Pax trilogy which has reached its conclusion.

Short sharp books that elicit fond memories of bygone schooldays and the lore of English literature ranging from Tom Brown to Grange Hill with a hint of a wizarding school on top.

The story revolves around the eponymous Pax, an assertive and industrious young boy, who gains admission to the elite school in the hope of becoming an Engineer in New London. This New London is run by a powerful Mayor who has built up new walls around London effectively keeping everyone they do not like out of the capital. 

Pax over the three books disrupts plans by the Mayor to garner more control over his population by way of mind-numbing propaganda and lies about those outside the walls namely the Countryside Alliance. 

Throughout Barkers's work he has always been able to bring an element of real-world truth to his writing as all the best science fiction does; the writing elicits an element of fear of what may be. And with the unsavoury images and stories coming out of America and that countries insatiable desire of total authoritarianism it certainly does ring true. 

Author David Barker 

Pleasingly, Barker knowing his main readers will be young adults he writes with a simpler good versus evil template with Pax and his erstwhile friends the ones wearing capes and flying around doing heroic things with robots, while the bad guys are those that wear masks and hold guns. Again, images all the more familiar nowadays in the days of ICE. 

While this book itself does not hit the heights of the second book in the series in this reader's opinion, the book is a fine straight-shooting end to this thrilling dystopian trilogy.

Pax and the Secret Swarm is out from Tiny Tree Books now on all formats.

My thanks to them for the review copy for an honest review.

Pynch - Beautiful Noise

Back with their second album, Pynch return 

When they first appeared on the Speedy Wunderground label with Disco Lights, Pynch have slowly built a loyal following based upon their clever rhythms and technical prowess with an ear for a hook with vital vocal delivery. Their first album 'Howling at a Concrete Moon' was an amalgamation of their singles with some filler but nevertheless a great listen about the disenchantment and allure of city life.

Today, they release their sophomore album Beautiful Noise. For some bands, this is always referred to as the difficult second album. But Pynch are not like some bands, they are a special four piece and have been since they released the slacker/covid-19 anthem 'Somebody Else' a track written before the global pandemic but whose tale of alienation and loneliness meant more within the troubled times.

The new album begins with 'Forever' and it is a reminder that Pynch unlike a lot of their contemporaries are well aware of the strength of the intro to a track - an enticing conduit for fans to get excited before Spencer Enock's distinct vocals come through.

Throughout the album, there is that spirit of DIY and shoegaze, a feeling that they are going to make music that they like without the hope that it connects but the belief that it will. There are winks to current music trends in 'Post-Punk/New-Wave' with the band themselves refusing to be pigeon-holed coupled with the single 'The Supermarket' with its driving bassline.

Upon further listenings, this album is a joy, for fans of early New Order whose post-Curtis' death were works of disillusionment along with the late 80s Depeche Mode. Think of 'Microwave Rhapsody', a song about sitting around and daydreaming; their unique knack of making universal the kitchen sink dramas they illustrate bodes well when they see the larger world available through touring.

They have already travelled to wider parts of Europe and the East coast of America; their guitar/electro sound sitting nice with the recent nostalgia binge of the Strokes/Yeah Yeah Yeah's period.

Title track and the longest one on the album, is perhaps their most, angry song, the lyric is about wanting to stay in bed and ignore the beautiful noise he sings about. And yet despite the heaviest sounding song, Spencer's forlorn earnest vocal remains engaging and it even detours into a jazzy sound ending which is rich and different in their scope. 

Even the penultimate track 'Come Outside' which showcases Spencer singing with drummer Julianna Hopkins, shows another avenue of invention possible to the band in future outings.

This is not so much a band with a foot in the door ready to eat at the top table, they are ready to kick that door down fully and announce themselves.

Self-released and self-produced on their Chillburn Recordings label, Beautiful Noise is out now on all formats.

Rebecca Schiffman - Before The Future

New York born singer-songwriter, Rebecca Schiffman, releases her fourth album on 25th July entitled Before The Future.

Born and raised on the East Coast, Schiffman has seemingly found her musical home on the west coast and the city of Los Angeles. This album features a multitude of guest artists and collaborators ranging from Deerhoof's Chris Cohen and Tim Carr (Perfume Genius) to name a couple. These new collaborative forces also changed her style of recording from the ten day relocation to the studio as she did with her first three albums; instead this album was recorded in more piecemeal due to the input of others. 

Starting with the title track and another with Cohen, creating this euphoric and anthemic sound for said title track that runs to nine plus minutes (an usual feat to front end an album with a long track). That track is about the grief from the untimely death of a childhood friend. It is the difficulty of grief and understanding of that emotion that is the underlying theme of the album throughout, as heard on 'Rudy's Song' which is about her bereavement for her beloved dog.

Schiffman has a gorgeous lilting voice, a soft delivery that works well with the pleasant melodies being played. Reminiscent of Margaret Glaspy in terms of singing style and Lori Anderson from yesteryear; Schiffman has crafted an album of a sunny disposition but with a more serious undercurrent to proceedings.

And yet there is joy such as 'Little Mr. Civility' about her two year old son, the new life in the world can change your outlook on many things. For Schiffman she did not want to become demonstrative in terms of making the rules and being strict, and this juggling of nature and nurture is the touchstone of the song.

All in all, this is an album of being aware of your feelings, expressing them the best way and how moments can channel or alter creative output. Schiffman is seeking balance between her long in the tooth East coast attitude and new found West coast sensibility; and in some ways she may have found it.

Before The Future is out on all platforms from 25th July

My thanks to OneBeatPR for the review opportunity.

Friend or Foe? - Ken Lussey

 

New entry in the Bob Sutherland WW2 series, 

out July 14th from Arachnid Press

Ken Lussey returns with Bob Sutherland and Monique Dubois with another thrilling, fast-paced tale set amidst the height of World War Two in Scotland.

It’s late June 1943. Bob and Monique Sutherland’s journey home from Malta is interrupted, first in London to hear Soviet claims of a German spy in Scotland and then by a shoot-out between US military units in Lancashire.

 

Having returned to Edinburgh, they remain only briefly before travelling with a Military Intelligence 11 team to Galloway to track down the spy. How best to catch a ghost who may already have uncovered vital military secrets? Can they find him before it’s too late? 

When two Soviet agents arrive in Galloway to help, Bob and Monique need to work out the difference between friend and foe. Does the German spy exist, or is he a Soviet invention intended to lure MI11 into danger?

Lussey as ever writes with such an assuredness in proceedings ranging from rations and the ability to drink champagne during wartime. This is thanks to his diligent research which even touches upon precise train times in Scotland. It is these details that help elevate this work above mere folly/

The most enticing entry of the book is the beginning when the Battle of Bamber surfaces; a real life occasion when Black American GIs had a fight with British civilians. This melding of fact and fiction always raises Lussey's works to that of importance and how we should look to the past to better understand our present, and how little has been learnt in nearly 80 years of passing.

Enticing and frantic, Lussey has again written a thrilling book of action set in real-life incidents a melding of fact and fiction in great unison. Another pleasing entry in this unique and special series.

Friend or Foe? is available from Arachnid Press now 

Getting Away - Kate Sawyer

New summer read by Kate Sawyer

This was a very pleasing read. A word of caution though, you will require a family tree/understanding of genealogy to remember the names and relations of all the people. However, once you get your head around that - this book was entertaining and enlightening. 

Using family holidays as the means to show familial relationships and how they alter over the years, decades and generations coupled with the ever-changing types of family holidays - from day outs to the beach by train, to the growing market of package holidays booked on Ceefax, to the globe-trotting gap years of the grandchildren.

Indebted to the work of David Nicholls, nevertheless Sawyer has crafted a work that is original yet familiar, comforting but challenging and by the end the reader would have developed a lump in their throat. Delicately handled with poise and guile by a writer with nuance. As you get nearer to the present day, the writer is able to incorporate the ever changing landscape of communication - using tweets, emails and magazine articles as a changing style of writing from by-gone eras of postcards and diary entries.

Sawyer writes with assuredness having an ear for how characters talk to each other, and she does this well with her plethora of protagonists ranging from the overweight police officer, to the shy retiring teenager who was born premature and must keep on fighting for his place in society

This is a book that will stay with the reader after completing it, and is a real find and a must for the summer of this year.

My thanks to Compulsive Readers for letting me be part of the blog tour for this title and the preview copy in advance.

Getting Away is published by Zaffre/Bonnier Books, thanks to them 

God As My Witness (2025)

A new documentary examines the Catholic clergy molestation scandal in Louisiana, screens at the 33rd Raindance Film Festival this June. The film is directed by Lindsay Quinn Pitre.

A harrowing and hard watch of a film over its 82 minute run time, about the lengths and depths of depravity men of the cloth went to hide their illicit behaviour.

The film is produced by Michael Brandner Sr, who in 2018 discovered a set of love letters from a priest to his younger brother, Scot. Scot committed suicide in the early 1990s at the age of 29.

After the first twenty minutes of talking head personal accounts of individuals who suffered molestation at the hands of clergymen. The film then shows the legal ramifications as attorneys of New Orleans brought claims against the church. The church faced so many clerical claims it had to file for federal bankruptcy protection in May 2020.

The case has cost the Archdiocese more than $40m in fees which remain unresolved. 

Tellingly, the film is left open-ended as this is an ongoing case with more people still to come forward. It allows you to see the story come to the viewer at this pace which is deliberate under the circumstances.

Heartfelt due to the personal nature of the Brander situation, this is a film that is a good companion to the Alex Gibney documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God (2012) which itself delved into the claims of abuse in the catholic church and touched upon in the Oscar winning film, Spotlight. 

This is a poignant documentary that is as much about healing as about the horrific acts put upon this vulnerable individuals.

God As My Witness has its World Premiere at the 33rd Raindance Film Festival on 26th June.

My thanks to Raindance for the screening link for review.