The Father of Make Believe is the latest instalment in the cinematic fantasy world that Coheed and Cambria have meticulously crafted over the last 30 years. It’s openly more personal in nature than previous albums but The Amory Wars storyline and Sci-Fi emo prog rock atmosphere that the band are known for are still as present.  

In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.

Does absolutely everything have to get more difficult with each passing year? Apparently so. The amount of time I’ve spent deciding which of the many truly excellent albums I’ve reviewed this year should get the ‘top prize’ has, frankly, been ridiculous. I’m not an indecisive person. And, for God knows that reason, I feel personally loyal to the artists upon whom it would have been easier to bestow this huge honour (Nadine Shah, Elbow, Joan as Policewoman, see below). I am choosing the road less travelled. Sort of.

Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. 

The once invincible superhero genre may have finally hit the skids, but Tom Hardy’s alien anti-hero stays intermittently fresh in his saga’s supposed finale, styled by writer-director Kelly Marcel as a partial romcom between parasitic, people-eating alien Venom and his reluctant human host Eddie Brock.

“When we hear the formula ‘once upon a time,’ or any of its variants,” wrote Angela Carter in her introduction to her Book of Fairy Tales, “we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. We say to children: Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.”  

Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one.

The latest blockbuster of 2024 is this disappointing fifth entry in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, owned by Legendary Pictures. About half of the film contain actors, while half of it is computer-generated – the likely brief future of cinema before AI takes over completely. In the battle for credibility between monsters and actors, the actors here come off decidedly worse.

In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary.