The monster contains multitudes, but no one referent exhausts it of its capacity to refer to something else, because the core of its being is outside our frames of reference. One of the thrills of Nope, as a work of weird fiction, is wondering just how much of our stories, our world, is similarly beyond our grasp.

I’m suggesting that to watch Succession well, we should start by thinking about how its representations are mediated. This is to determine Succession’s mode of representation by thinking carefully about how its style interacts with the thematic conceit of the show, which is to do with information media, and a billionaire American family.

Shows like Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek (or Rosehaven) represent the continuation of the pastoral fantasy in the context of social and political upheaval. The pastoral endures in the English imagination, the context where Williams excavated its grip, but the category is just as applicable elsewhere in an age of environmental catastrophe, political upheaval and economic immiseration.

Luster is smart, and funny, and very sad, and extremely good in its own right. In observing the refracted desires and self-critiques that guide Edie’s romantic trajectory, we can see one example of how race, age and privilege intersect to influence what it is that we want when we have sex.

Judyth Emanuel’s Yeh Hell Ow is a work of suburban (high) modernism, a successor to Joyce or Woolf and worthy contemporary of Eimear McBride and Claire Louise Bennett, transplanted into tropical suburbs and surgically given a new tongue. It is a novel that plays on the unsteady, drunken relationship between sound and meaning and the equally unstable relationship between what we think and what we say.

Machado is building, fragment by fragment, another house. She is creating a context for abused queer people to locate themselves and shifting authority away from the palatial archive of heterosexual, male-on-female physical abuse to a place with room for the queer and the nuanced.

Is Jägerstätter’s sacrifice best understood in religious terms, or can it be conceived within a secular moral framework?

Even as they are ‘just’ entertainment, these fictional narratives of popular film still teach and tell stories about angry men and their relationship to violent retribution which overlap with everyday gender politics. They also function as cultural capsules which capture the fears and tensions of the time.

Like Xena before it, The Witcher has shown sword and sorcery’s ability to adapt to changing audiences’ taste and expectations by expunging some of the genre’s most problematic characteristics, such as celebration of an omnipotent hypermasculinity.

A particular production of King Lear is in the headlines at the moment because a tabloid newspaper reported on the sexual harassment of the young actor playing Cordelia. The famous actor playing Lear is the alleged perpetrator. [...] It is not the purposes of this piece of writing to analyse that particular incident. Rather, it is to take focus on the body of Cordelia at this moment and to consider this body and Lear’s tragedy in the contemporary moment.

Wood manages to turn a review of Kent MacCarter’s recently released collection California Sweet, published by Five Islands Press, into a jeremiad bemoaning an apparent crisis of opportunity instigated by his own experience of rejection from ‘a nationally prominent, poetry-specific publishing house.’ Inauspicious, but it gets worse.

But there is no Stella Count for film criticism; instead, the women film critics I know employ a less formal and statistically rigorous response involving pinot noir, vented spleens and a high volume of f-words.

Everywhere you look Aboriginal writers, actors, musicians and artists are on the rise, and recent festivals like Asia TOPA illustrate the industry’s desire to showcase artists beyond the white canon. Despite these shifts, systemic racism and prejudices pervade, hidden behind marketing material with alluring POC faces splashed across posters and company webpages.