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2 weeks ago | 
inews.co.uk | Ed Power |Emily Baker
As if the nightly news and our daily social media feeds weren’t dystopian enough, this week Netflix will unleash a seventh series of Charlie Brooker’s future-shock anthology series Black Mirror. Buckle up for further tales of virtual reality gone wrong and seemingly benign technology revealed to have a demonic flip-side.
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3 weeks ago | 
independent.co.uk | Ed Power
In FocusThree years after the slap seen and heard around the world, the Oscar winner is performing in Scarborough and releasing an album of inspirational hip-hop. Has it all gone wrong for one of our biggest stars, asks Ed PowerTwo images have arguably come to define Will Smith’s career.
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3 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
Rushmere Artist: Mumford & SonsLabel: IslandAs nu-folk figureheads, Mumford & Sons helped set the template for a sort of beard-positive weepy man-pop: they walked so The Lumineers, Hozier and Noah Kahan could fly. But until recently there was a suspicion that time had not been kind to nu-folk, a movement criticised for its Londoncentric upper-middle-classness and for the fact that most of its artists sounded like Waitrose versions of The Band.
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4 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
In 2014, Seth Rogen nearly dismantled a Hollywood studio by accident when his Kim Jong-un send-up The Interview brought down the wrath of North Korean hackers on the heads of executives at Sony Pictures. A decade and a bit on, the wheel has turned full circle, with Rogen playing the head of fictional Continental Studios in the outrageously enjoyable and cameo-crammed The Studio (Apple TV+, from Wednesday). Cameos?
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
With its grinning cheerleaders, half-time shows and annoyingly optimistic fans, it can be argued that American football is the spiritual opposite of the GAA – a bone-crunching triumph of style over substance, of pizazz over purgatorial perseverance on waterlogged winter pitches. But if you make it in Gridiron, the rewards are considerable, with players’ salaries in the professional game averaging $3.2 million – even more than some top GAA managers might hope to claim back in mileage.
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1 month ago | 
inews.co.uk | Ed Power
There is no shame in emulating the greats. But This City Is Ours wants to be Liverpool’s answer to The Godfather so badly that the reek of desperation is in danger of fogging up the screen like stale cigarette smoke. As with Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia classic, the BBC’s new Sunday night drama from The Last Kingdom writer Stephen Butchard features betrayal, violence and a gangster who wants to leave his criminal background behind to start over again with his lover.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
When you travel the globe kitted out like Viking warriors, there’s a lot of potential for misunderstanding. Just ask Heilung. “We come with weapons. Swords, spears. They’re sharp. There are places in the world you really have to argue that these are theatre props and not meant for battle,” Maria Franz, the experimental folk group’s singer, says with a laugh from her home in Copenhagen. “There are certain elements that we simply can’t bring. I have a human bone that I’m playing on.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) Artist: Japanese BreakfastLabel: Dead OceansMichelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast spent years scratching out an existence on the lower rungs of the American indie circuit before belatedly achieving success during the pandemic. Yet, to her enduring bafflement, her route to the big time was not musical but literary, with her 2021 memoir about her mother’s death, Crying in H Mart, becoming a publishing sensation.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
The unofficial – or perhaps even official – motto of Sky’s Gangs of London (Sky Atlantic, 9pm) could be “gore the merrier”. This ultra-violent, hyper-cartoonish crime romp has placed huge stock across its previous two seasons in the visceral joy of crunching limbs and spurting arteries.
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1 month ago | 
irishtimes.com | Ed Power
There is a hard-hitting documentary to be made about the wellness industry and whether a minority of practitioners might not be selling scented snake oil to desperate people. But TG4’s Sonas (“Happiness”) is not that documentary. This is feel-good factual filmmaking, where hard questions are left to one side, and everyone has a grand time. Still, it is what it is and benefits from the presence of Áine Ní Bhreisleáin, a likeable host on an engaging, emotional journey.
