The Screen Scribe

Side Notes: The Difference Between Adaptation and Interpretation

December 5, 2025

There is a recurring flaw in modern film discourse. Audiences talk about films based on source material as if they all belong to one tidy category. Everything is an adaptation. Everything succeeds or fails based on accuracy. Everything must be judged against a text that supposedly carries definitive authority. This is a misunderstanding born out…
Recommendation: Home Alone

December 3, 2025

There are Christmas movies that warm your heart, and then there are Christmas movies that make you laugh until your sides ache. Home Alone somehow manages to do both. Released in 1990, directed by Chris Columbus and written by John Hughes, it became an instant holiday classic and still holds its crown as one of…
Review: Frieren – Beyond Journeys End

December 1, 2025

Every now and then an anime arrives that reminds you what the medium can achieve when it slows down, takes a breath and lets the narrative speak softly rather than shout. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is that rare series. It is gentle, reflective and patient. It refuses to rush toward spectacle or lean on empty…
Side Notes: How Stranger Things Took Over The World

November 28, 2025

Once upon a time, a small-town story about missing kids, flickering lights, and a girl with a shaved head dropped quietly on Netflix. No one expected it to rewrite pop culture. But Stranger Things didn’t just become a show, it became the show. A cultural earthquake that shook the streaming age, resurrected the 1980s, and…
Recommendation: Saving Private Ryan

November 26, 2025

Few films have reshaped the way we think about war on screen the way Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan did in 1998. Before its release, World War II had often been depicted with a certain Hollywood gloss, heroic charges, stirring speeches, clear-cut good and evil. Spielberg stripped all that away. What he delivered instead was…
Review: Frankenstein

November 24, 2025

There are films you expect to enjoy, and there are films that remind you why cinema exists in the first place. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein falls into the latter category, even if its cinematic release was strangely brief. It is rare for an adaptation of a literary classic to feel both reverent and revitalised, but…
Side Notes: How Good was 80s Cinema Really?

November 21, 2025

Stack the VHS tapes high. Hit play on the crackling logo. Hear the synths hum through tinny speakers and the reel begin to spin. For many, that sound is the heartbeat of a golden age. The 1980s are often remembered as the era when cinema became spectacle, when stories leaped from film reels to toy…
Recommendation: The Hurt Locker

November 19, 2025

Some war films focus on sweeping battles, others on the politics that fuel them. The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, zooms in on something far more intimate: the psychology of the soldier. Released in 2008 and set during the Iraq War, it follows a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit as they face the daily,…
Review: Predator – Badlands

November 19, 2025

The Predator franchise has been many things over the years. Brutal. Clumsy. Inspired. Chaotic. Occasionally brilliant. What it has rarely been is introspective. Predator: Badlands changes that. Instead of treating the Yautja as faceless killers, it finally sits with them, listens to them, and gives the audience a point of view inside their culture. That…
Side Notes: Is The Streaming Era Dying?

November 14, 2025

There was a time when the streaming revolution felt like liberation. No schedules, no ads, no waiting. Just a glowing interface, a bottomless library, and the power to watch whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. It was the end of gatekeeping. The dawn of creative freedom. The future of entertainment. Now, as screens overflow with…