It sucks, it bites, sometimes it’s bloody brilliant

Absolutely filthy, intermittently brilliant and utterly exhausting, the latest round of cinematic lunacy from polarizing Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) cycles through vampire mythology with messy, maximalist glee.

An absurdist arthouse take on cheap, trashy, clickbaiting “content,” the film both critiques and wallows in the banal excesses of our era. As it lurches toward the three-hour mark, Dracula (in Romanian, with English subtitles) becomes a fascinating but frustrating creative stalemate, piled up with gratuitous gore, porno provocations and deliberately obvious and awful AI slop.

Jude holds things together — just barely — with an unnamed onscreen filmmaker (Adonis Tanta) who talks directly to the camera. The Director, as he’s called in the credits, has decided to use a screenwriting chatbot to generate stories about Dracula, the fictional character based partly on Vlad the Impaler, an important historical figure in Romania.

After a rapid montage of the worst kind of icky, uncanny, big-eyed AI kitsch — in which we see Space Dracula, Baby Dracula, Hot Dracula, Historical Dracula and more — Jude dives into longer riffs.

Santa slasher quick, dirty, but also top-notch

A few decades back, the movie Silent Night, Deadly Night was a creature that stirred controversy all through December of 1984.

While somewhat nastier and sleazier than the usual ’80s slasher, its downfall — that is, being removed from theatres before it had even begun its wide release — was contained within its Christmas trimmings. The idea of a psycho Santa was too much for Reagan-era audiences in the U.S., even though an axe-wielding psycho Santa was highlighted some 12 years earlier in the 1972 holiday release Tales from the Crypt. But despite its abbreviated run, it would achieve cult status, spawning two sequels and two reboots.

The new iteration of Silent Night, shot in Manitoba earlier this year, redeems the source material with a fresh take that, uncomfortably, compels the audience to be more sympathetic to its designated psycho.

Billy Chapman (Rohan Campbell of Halloween Ends and The Hardy Boys) is an itinerant young man who arrives by bus into a small Midwestern town with apparently evil intent. Dream flashbacks tell the story of his early childhood trauma: As a little boy, he witnessed the brutal slaying of his parents by a shotgun-brandishing Santa.

New Music

FONTINE

Good Buddy (Birthday Cake Records)

The opening, fuzzed-out guitar chords of this album’s title track serve notice that there’s more to Fontine Beavis than she revealed on her debut EP, Yarrow Lover.

That six-song outing from 2023 introduced the Brandon-raised, Winnipeg-based musician as an indie folk-pop singer-songwriter, writing about finding her own space, both in love and in the world. On Good Buddy, Fontine is still concerned with matters of heart and place but, with music that recalls the blissfully noisy power pop of Matthew Sweet — especially on the record’s opening salvo of Good Buddy and Body Double — she’s also clearly more confident about who she is and what she feels.

Christmas flicks target of PTE holiday improv

With construction ongoing at Portage Place, the Christmas season will look different in the downtown mall’s history: the food court is walled off, the clock tower’s gone, and earlier this week, the legendary fountains were removed.

But at Prairie Theatre Exchange, the theatre company housed on the mall’s top floor, annual holiday traditions are well underway.

In the rehearsal spaces, preparation has begun for Munsch Upon a Time, a five-story showcase of the iconic children’s author’s work. Written by Debbie Patterson, the upcoming run (Dec. 19-Jan. 3) marks the first time PTE has visited Munsch’s world onstage since before the pandemic, when a shift in programming put a halt to the decades-old custom.

During the annual Munsch show’s hiatus, PTE forged a new holiday tradition with the improv comedy group Outside Joke. Since Christmas 2022, Andrea del Campo, RobYn Slade, Toby Hughes, Jane Testar, Chadd Henderson and Paul De Gurse have been developing one-of-a-kind, one-night-only holiday fare for PTE.

Spotify’s top 2025 audiobooks led by romance, fantasy

Fantasy and romance titles continued to dominate the literary landscape in 2025, particularly as it pertains to audiobooks.

A Publishers Weekly report notes that according to data released by Spotify, Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros was the most listened to audiobook of 2025 in North America, with Yarros’ Iron Flame also appearing in the top 10. The second most listened to audiobook was Lights Out by Navessa Allen, while romantasy author Sarah J. Maas nabbed three of the top 10 spots with titles from her A Court of Thorns and Roses series.

This is the first year Spotify has released its year-end audiobook data, according to the story. Other authors in the top 10 included J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King and Freida McFadden.

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Updike’s correspondence chronicled in expansive, enlightening collection

American author John Updike, who died in 2009 at age 76, was one of the world’s foremost men of letters, a writer who mastered many genres — novels, short stories, essays, poems and critiques. Thanks to University of Cincinnati professor James Schiff, a large selection of Updike’s personal letters, nearly 900 pages’ worth, can now be added to his impressive output of over 60 books.

Schiff presents the letters in chronological order, leading off with some that Updike wrote in his teens, many showing his early interest in cartooning. When he was away from his rural Pennsylvania home, attending Harvard University, he wrote regularly to his parents, Linda and Wesley. Linda developed her own writing skills and eventually followed John into the publishing world.

Most of Updike’s letters in 1952, when the author was 20, are either telling his parents about Mary Pennington, his new girlfriend, or those to Pennington herself. She was two years older than John, and got along so well that he soon talked marriage. In one letter to her he wrote, “I intend to keep you a virgin until the wedding night (I am one too, you know).” They married on June 26, 1953, and a year later, after John graduated summa cum laude, they went to Oxford, England for a year, where he attended art school.

Meanwhile, after many rejections, Updike had a poem and then a short story accepted by the New Yorker magazine. He became a regular writer for the New Yorker while keeping his parents posted on such developments as Mary’s becoming pregnant. Elizabeth was born in England, the first of four children he and Mary would have together. The book includes Updike’s drawing of Elizabeth’s baby face. There are many such sketches, as well as 24 separate pages of photographs.

Far-future fiction feels brilliantly ambitious

If you’re not familiar with Claire North, you’ve been missing out. Beginning with 2014’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, she’s published a string of beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, occasionally mind-blowing novels.

North’s latest, Slow Gods (Orbit, 448 pages, $26), might also be her most ambitious.

Consider its setting: the far-flung future, where entire civilizations are about to be wiped out by a supernova. Consider its narrator: an interplanetary pilot who died and was reborn, who has since lived several lives. Consider the story: spanning vast distances and centuries of time, from its first sentence (“My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself…”) it promises — and delivers — something we’ve never seen before. Magnificent.

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KGB archivist’s deceit both personal, political

Vasili Mitrokhin was an obscure, nondescript archivist for the KGB, the Soviet secret police and espionage organization, which he dutifully served from the late 1950s to 1984.

But appearances were deceptive.

From 1972 to 1984, Mitrokhin took the risk of making copies of top secret KGB files. The copies were painstakingly written on small sheets of paper which Mitrokhin would cram into his shoes.

He compiled a massive archive that he would eventually deliver to British intelligence, greatly harming the operations of his erstwhile employer.

On the night table: Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson

Singer, Finger Eleven

There’s a graphic artist named Chris Ware who writes a comic called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). It’s this anthology that’s incredibly detailed and heartbreaking and wonderful. I try to find other similar graphic novels and nothing else feels like it. It’s interesting and sad yet funny and, again, meticulously detailed. It’s hard to figure out what’s biographical and what’s not.

Strained relationship with father sees Atlantic editor turn to distance running for solace

On dark Winnipeg mornings, heavy eyes, tight muscles and the magnetism of a warm bed make it tough to hit the icy pavement.

But there’s something maniacal and joyful in the army of 5:00 am-ers who defy the odds every day. Intent and content to push bodies to their limits — and perhaps more importantly, to conjure chemically induced euphorias where life seems to make sense — the mind becomes sharper and one can reflect on purpose, promise and perhaps the deep regrets which nag like an old hamstring injury.

Such is the memoir of Atlantic Monthly editor Nicholas Thompson, who in The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports, chronicles his obsession with running and his fraught relationship with a damaged father. Despite his young age of 50, it’s a memoir that is in some ways an owner’s manual on one’s body as we succumb to entropy and on our minds, as our brains begin to crystallize — we become wiser, more reflective, but we lose the spark of the innovation of youth.

Born into significant privilege, Thompson’s parents provided a loving home where he first learned to run through and with his father. A former Rhodes Scholar from Stanford, his father failed to launch, as it were, despite the promise which seemed to carry him through in his 20s. Scotty Thompson would struggle his whole life with alcoholism and his own sexuality, leading to a divorce, addictions to both sex and alcohol and a painful relationship with his son.

Raptors’ workhorse players profiled in chronicle of perennial underdogs

With all due deference to the Winnipeg Sea Bears, the NBA’s Toronto Raptors is Canada’s team when it comes to professional basketball.

The year 2025 marks the Raptors’ 30th anniversary. Longtime Raptors games radio broadcaster Eric Smith and Ghent University English professor Andrew Bricker have penned a book of backstories to celebrate that mark and the team’s history.

As celebrations go, it’s not terribly moving.

The book’s format is unusual. It consists of profiles of Raptors players going back over the last 30 years. But it’s not the marquee players who are interviewed and mini-biographied.

Travel writer turned wary spy back in action in Boyd’s 1960s thriller

British writer William Boyd is a Booker Prize-nominated literary novelist with a knack for pacy, persuasive storytelling. In The Predicament, a 1960s-set tale of reluctant MI6 spy Gabriel Dax, he supplies his usual textured, descriptive prose but struggles to deliver a compelling and cohesive plot.

Boyd has used espionage narratives before, exploring themes of identity and deception in weighty novels such as Restless and Waiting for Sunrise. Lighter and looser, the Gabriel Dax books might be closer to what Graham Greene used to call “entertainments.”

The Predicament is the second instalment of a proposed trilogy that began with Gabriel’s Moon (2024). (You don’t need to have read that novel to understand this one — Boyd sketches in necessary plot connections — but it would enhance the character background.)

Gabriel is a travel writer, somewhat solitary, his sleep sometimes troubled by a traumatic childhood event that killed his mother. In the first Dax book, he stumbled into becoming a freelance double agent for the British secret service, his globe-trotting work providing perfect cover.

Giuffre’s quest for justice lives on in posthumous memoir

Because sexual trafficking survivor Virginia Roberts Giuffre was central to exposing elite abusers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, much has been written about her. After four years’ collaboration with writer Amy Wallace, Giuffre, who died in April 2025, is finally able to tell her own story to “aim some light at the darkness and force it to crawl back into its cave.”

Giuffre grew up in Florida, “buoyed by the knowledge that… mom loved having a daughter.” She describes sweet days filled with reading, drawing, playing and falling in love with her horse Alice. “With her I felt completely safe. I didn’t yet know there were reasons to be afraid,” she writes.

Giuffre is seven when her father introduces her to fear. Calling it “extra love,” he begins molesting her, ensuring her compliance by threatening to get rid of Alice. Simultaneously her mother becomes cold and remote, whipping Giuffre and suggesting she “was just a big mistake.”

The sexual, psychological and physical damage intensifies when Giuffre’s father lets his friend molest her. When she becomes “a rebellious mess,” her mother consigns her to “a tough-love treatment center” that “left the love out.”

Poisoned water plot propels Penny’s latest

The latest novel by Louise Penny, Canada’s queen of the mystery scene, is out just in time for holiday gift giving.

The many twists and turns contained within The Black Wolf are sure to please Penny’s legion of fans as well as those who appreciate a satisfying read on a winter’s night.

Over the past 20 years, the former CBC journalist and broadcaster has introduced chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec Armand Gamache, his wife Reine-Marie, family and friends and his cosy village of Three Pines — located in an undisclosed location in rural Quebec — to mystery aficionados around the world.

Since releasing Still Life in 2005, she has written another 19 books that have garnered a host of awards, been on the New York Times bestseller list repeatedly and sold in the millions globally.