Is Tintin Transgender? Last week I wrote about other dimensions. This week I'd like to take the plunge into alternative animated worlds: what if we could see beyond the published cartoon frames of my favourite character from childhood, Tintin? There was always something about Tintin's androgyny, his anodyne spirit about making the world a bett...

Murder on the Orient Express 05.11.17 Murder on the Orient Express . It's a film about the luxury train, with a murder on it. What else is there to say of this enjoyable, nothing-special film? I went for visual stimulation and escapism and I think it's what I got given, like caviar or some other overrated thing. I knew I would get a glimpse of how ...

What's On? 03.11.17 How many classic films have you seen? There are plenty that I haven't, including perhaps the most famous one of all, Citizen Kane – whose reputation, like Joyce's Ulysses , is of an art work more celebrated than experienced. If I ever make it to retirement, or better still to a post-studies settling down (with own home, car, and...

Out Of This World: A Tribute To Brit Marling 29.10.17 There are moments, they appear before you on screen or in a book or in a song, and they capture what you yearn for. This might be the case for anyone, and is certainly so for those who repress something. But then, doesn't everyone have something they can't have? Isn't that how the psyc...

Thor: Ragnarok 28.10.17 Two thirds of the way through Thor: Ragnarok , there's a superlative piece of slow-mo action that should have lasted longer. We see in a historical flashback the Valkyries – an all-woman army on winged horseback – approaching the story's villain, Cate Blanchett's Hela, in a final role of the dice. It's a scene akin to those ...

What's On? 27.10.17 Perhaps the superhero I have the least connection with on our screens today is Thor. I never watch his movies; I feel nothing for the super-serious Norse world that he comes from – it strikes me in the trailers as bland, a pompous landscape of furrowed brows, facial hair, formal tones of voice and shining breastplates. As f...

Trans vs TERFs 22.10.17 It's the red rag to a bull, from a transgender perspective: radical feminists, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and what we're meant to think of each other. I read this week an article in The Big Issue (October 16-22) about violence at a protest from some weeks ago, between trans and anti-trans activists ...

The Death of Stalin 21.10.17 My first issue wasn't with the film but the cinema. Two price hikes by Cameo within so many months left me with the cost of £9.20 for a film, on a student membership. It's strange how the little things can unsettle you beforehand, but the Cameo always felt like my cinema. Given that they've given a make-over to the...

Reflections on Sense8 15.10.17 The Wachowskis have made art with messages before. The Matrix asked questions of reality, while bringing cyberpunk style into Western fashion – Neo, Trinity and Morpheus became our vulnerable superheroes for the computer age. Who hasn't thought about which pill they'd take, the red one or the blue one? For that matter...

Come Die In Dubai 08.10.17 The flashbacks came three weeks ago, with the story of a UK citizen arrested in Dubai. Jamil Mukadam had been tailgated by a Dubai local on a highway, flashed and nearly driven off the road. The British driver flipped his middle finger in fury, then later got arrested for obscene behaviour. He's facing a six-month sentenc...

What's On? 08.10.17 I was a Twentieth-Century boy – before later updating to this Twenty-First Century woman. Born in 1975, I grew up with the dying of the Cold War: a Soviet Union whose danger I didn't countenance, and a USA whose glamour and glitz bewitched me. How could it not? I started on a diet of Disney and Hannah-Barbara – not to ...

Blade Runner 2049 06.10.17 I sat there in the full auditorium thinking about me as I often do during the special films. Then again, it's difficult not to with a film about cyborgs, when you're transgender and you witness again that born-in-middle-age imagery. When you realize the Grail in the plot is the discovery that cyborgs might be able to give...

Saudi Female Drivers 30.09.17 They're three words I thought I'd never use, but this week in the oil rich Kingdom, Saudi female drivers were given the green light to drive in their own country. Not all will want to, of course, just like in the West, and it's also worth noting another barrier, that the Kingdom is a macho-fuelled, computer-game simula...

Wind River 30.09.17 Yes, finally. Wind River is a film that combines suspense with art, to the backdrop of a bleak winter whiteness; a girl's death is captured and a story enfolds. There are so many reasons to watch this film. The Nick-Cave co-written soundtrack blends into the hostile, pristine scenery where native Americans battle their demons an...

What's On? 28.09.17 I've been scared off these last two weeks by a middling review in Empire magazine, but I think I will finally go and see Wind River this weekend. It has Elizabeth Olsen, after all, and few actors can conjure ghostly bewilderment, with those round startled eyes of a winter sky-blue. I saw Olsen in her breakout movie, the indie Ma...

What happened to the thing I loved? 24.09.17 American football, like nothing else, rose before me in the 1980s while I was still working out how to be a boy. In Wales we had semi-professional rugby and a football team that never quite qualified for anything. The Darwinian in me stared from across the pond and sighed in awe at the San Francisco 49er...

What's On? 21.09.17 Flags are funny things. For countries they're so pivotal, and actually can be nice to look at. I used to have a bedroom poster of all the flags of the world, I was drawn especially to Africa, and the flags of Kenya and Uganda, and for their colours, Botswana and Tanzania. Favourite flag of all? Obviously Wales, but Ireland's fla...

Communities 17.09.17 With Edinburgh University still in Fresher-Week mode yesterday, I participated in an LGBT info event, with myriad groups manning stalls. I met with organisers and took their literature as they took from mine – I have a feeling that my event-organizing this year is going to be a much more collaborative effort. This means bigger ...

Mother! 16.09.17 I'm going through a crisis of faith with my reviews: I thought It was nothing special last weekend, and having just returned from Edinburgh's Omni Vue cinema, I have to say Mother! is also a film to avoid. How could The Guardian 's Peter Bradshaw have given it five stars? The movie is a Monty Python sketch turned into Hollywood hor...

What's On? 16.09.17 The big movie event this weekend is Mother! starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem (with Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris supporting), a disturbing psychological horror about terrible things in the adult world, to follow last week's It and the focus on childhood. I'm looking forward to Mother! because I could really do with...