If you sell enough books, or enough movie tickets, or designer scents, you get at least one free pass. With Nine Perfect Strangers, on the back of the dual number one New York Times bestsellers Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty and the HBO adaptation of the former, Liane Moriarty has published her free pass. Because really, what is Nine Perfect Strangers? You can read it from cover to cover without being entirely sure. There is something here, but it becomes buried under the extraneous compost that Moriarty tosses about with abandon.

Grady Hendrix knows a little something about Satan, as both his non-fiction Paperbacks from Hell and his fictional canon would attest. As concerned hand wringers have long known, those who know much of the Dark Lord and Master are also quite familiar with Metal in all its forms – Heavy, Dark, Speed, Thrash, and, Beelzebub help us, Nu – and in We Sold Our Souls, Hendrix literally marries the two. The names have changed a bit, but the facts remain: listen to the “wrong” music and be damned. Hendrix’s satire of dark materialism is sleek and compact, about as subtle as some of music it pays homage to, and is best read while wearing a lead foil hat (tinfoil is for amateurs).

John Cho uses a computer that always has the camera turned on – basically the nightmare of anyone who uses the internet consistently. Searching is a movie defined by its limitations, but it doesn’t suffer too terribly from them. You just wouldn’t want to watch too many of these screen time movies.

Read the full review of Searching at Trespass.

The success of Gone Girl lead to a series of imitators. Some of them are full blooded and can stand on their own, but a lot of them are pale. Gillian Flynn’s book was not thrown together, but was carefully constructed and plotted – and she and other authors alike are probably sick of the endless comparisons. When you have a book like Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favour, which is a blatant facsimile of Gone Girl with all the good parts taken out and a thousand idiotic kitchen sinks thrown in, you have to make the comparison. A Simple Favour literally could not exist without the intervention of Gillian Flynn, and humanity is collectively stupider for it.

Spoilometer: this write up goes into a fair amount of detail about The Shining. It is not safe if you want to discover the secrets of The Overlook for yourself, because The Shining is one of the more pure delights available on this mortal plane.

The third book in Stephen King’s catalogue is The Shining, which is famous for inspiring one of the most iconic films of all time. However, Kubrick’s The Shining is the first of many adaptations that King has been disappointed in, to the point that he eventually had to sign an agreement saying that he would stop publicly expressing his distaste for the film.

While The Shining (1980) rightfully has a place in the cinematic canon, The Shining is a novel that we can not (doctor) sleep on. While both Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot had much to recommend them, The Shining is arguably his first masterpiece. Drawing on what we would come to recognise as parts of King’s personal, professional, and family life, there are many demons exercised and exorcised between these pages. The Shining is a completely realised work in a way that few novels of any genre are.

Constance Wu is one of the finest actresses working today: magnetic, funny, tough and vulnerable, she deserves to have her own movie. In Crazy Rich Asians, that dream has come true for us all. Crazy Rich Asians is a fun rom-com based on – and changed from – the first instalment of Kevin Kwan’s bestselling trilogy. It’s exactly like a lot of things you’ve seen before, but it never matters when it’s done as well as this.

Read the review at Trespass.

It’s no secret that the world is in political turmoil, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, set in the seventies, feels as painfully relevant as it does. Much can, and has, been said about the movie’s propping up of the police force as an institution despite its systemic racism, but it is a powerful piece of cinema and well made indeed.

Read the full review on Trespass.