Many among us have nobly succumbed to the temptation of treating a film such as ‘The Odyssey’ (2026) as little more than an excuse to put on our Culturati Hats and get to nitpicking.

Writer Maddy Maguire sits down and interviews Leeds-based band Split the Ticket following the release of their latest single 'I Don't Know My Name.'

Photo by Umair Dingmar on Unsplash (licensed under the Unsplash licence) In the summer of 2025, the two-part documentary ‘The Hunt for Shannon Matthews’ (Ben Sheldon, 2025) was released – all about the staged kidnapping that put my hometown of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire on the map. I watched it, of course. My whole family did. I even made my boyfriend – privately educated and capable of pronouncing his t’s – watch it too. A sort of “look at this crazy place I call home” exercise. Otherwise, I’m...

Photo by Julia Barrantes via Pexels (licensed under the Pexels Licence) Erika Kohut, the piano teacher, stands in her ultralong skirt and perfectly modest blouse, clutching the chest from which blood now oozes – a self-inflicted stab wound. She does not cry. She exits the concert hall in which she is set to perform and disappears into the streets of Vienna. The credits roll. Congratulations, viewer, you may now mark ‘The Piano Teacher’ (Michael Haneke, 2001) as watched on Letterboxd. For...

Illustration by Maddy Maguire Every woman with a Letterboxd account and an attraction to the opposite sex can tell you precisely where they were when Timothée Chalamet first bewitched them. Personally, I was in my living room, pretending to revise for my A-level mocks. Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2019) was on the television, muted, and I looked up for two seconds only to forget what it meant to breathe. It’s a terrible truth, but it is my own. There Timothée was, in all his French-American...