This one was unknown to me, but in the search for something mindless, fun and action-packed after a long work week, we opted for Arnold Schwarzenegger doing what he does best: muscles and unintentional comedy. I was expecting it to be pretty bad, and I can’t argue that it was some brilliant filmmaking, but I did actually really enjoy it. Arnie can’t act but that’s not why we watch him, and he used his ridiculous strength well in this one. The child wasn’t irritating, which helps, and I actually really liked the pilot woman who helped him out.

With his daughter all grown and gone to university, Chris is back with another book of stories from El Valero, the Spanish farm he lives on. There’s no chance of getting lonely, however, as there’s a constant stream of visitors coming in or adventures to be had outside, and we get to hear them all.

Rob Brydon’s autobiography is deliberately set in the period from birth to just as he broke through and become a household name. I admire that, considering the world of autobiographies can be about just spilling the beans on your rich and famous friends.

Interesting one this, a story about aliens farming humans for meat, and following the trails of one particular alien who has to trawl up and down the roads of Scotland in search of hitchhikers who won’t be noticed if they disappear.

I knew far more of this album than I’d anticipated, so plenty to sing along with. Great songwriting skills and lots of interesting instrumentation and sounds to keep each song alive and fascinating.

Wonderful album, soul with real heart, sultry movements and genuinely relaxing vibes. One of the tracks had just a bit too much repetition for me, but it’s a small complaint in a really good body of work.

I’d always wondered about this book but had never really been inclined to read it until the kerfuffle kicked up over the sequel/first draft that was published last year. With my interested piqued, I finally got round to reading it, and what a wonderful book it was. I understand the fuss now, I really do.

I actually found myself laughing out loud more than I’d anticipated, it was funny all the way through. Some of the jokes were crude, some obvious, some more nuanced and detailed, I really liked the variety. It was a bit weird watching OJ in a film but thankfully he wasn’t in it that much, and when he was, he was just being thrown around for comic effect anyway. I was also surprised how many liberties the script writers were allowed to take with the Queen! Bit dated in places, but overall entertaining.

I’m so disappointed in this. I know that this was a good film, that I’ve seen it before and enjoyed it. And I wanted to watch it again because, you know, Leonard Nimoy! But this time, oh my word, it was impossible to get more than 25 minutes in because of that baby and its incessant crying.

In honour of Garry Marshall, we quickly righted this wrong and watched the film. It’s quaint to see Hathaway so young but so quirky already, but if I’m honest, the star of the film for me was Joe. His guidance of the potential princess, his all-knowing attitude as a chauffeur, and the spark of romance with the wonderful Julie Andrews, awww, it has my heart warming just thinking about him.

It wasn’t quite as good as I’d built it up in my head, but it was still a really good film. It got off to a slow start, I think, but once things picked up and everyone started acting like complete maniacs, it was a lot of fun. I was impressed with the effects, a few of them went a bit wonky, but there were a couple that I’m still not sure how would be achieved today, let alone twenty years ago. Some of the fashion choices haven’t aged particularly well and I was annoyed at the scene where Goldie has lipstick on her teeth - they couldn’t have shot that again?

This one was similar to the last, in that it looked like it had the potential to be a good film, but the story didn’t quite make sense. Also, there were some seriously dodgy special effects along the way (some of the London river stuff was particularly bad). Having said that, there was one sequence that was really good, where it was a long one-shot take as the battle took place in the streets. Really liked that.

I picked this book up after doing just a little bit of research about Cheddar Gorge and finding some detective fiction based around the Somerset area. It’s an interesting story, a little bit too much detail on the rock climbing which went totally over my head, but otherwise a good murder mystery.

This book is a love story, written in two parts - the present where a new widow is forced to remember an old love, and then the past, catching up the story of the three main characters until the present. I struggled, a little, with the way the book is structured, because you start at the end, where it is obvious what is going to happen, so the rest of it seems a little fruitless.

A long, long while back, I wrote my five reasons for not going to the cinema anymore, and occasionally if I’m ever asked why I dislike watching films on the big screen, I point people towards that post. All of it still holds true, and as I get more cranky and my TV setup at home gets more awesome, there’s less of a reason to fork out for cinema tickets for any blockbuster release.

I’ve been looking forward to this since I saw the first trailer, and at last, it arrived. I loved it just as much as I thought I would, it’s the perfect mix of cute and funny, as well as telling a serious tale with genuine feelings. I actually thought some elements of it were a bit much for a kids film, but that’s what parents are for, isn’t it, to decide on that kind of thing. As an adult, I thought it was perfectly pitched, and really, truly, hilarious in places.

A different, self-indulgent kind of experience. The songs are super long, so you have to settle in and go with it. Money for Nothing remains a favourite but I love how the songs are all so different with great layering and instrument work to make it a real gem.

Love this album! Guitar pop loveliness, really listenable, jolly for the most part and a few songs you can really tap your foot to. I just dislike the one song that is exactly like Teardrops from Eurovision.

Looking at Rotten Tomatoes just before publishing, I noticed this film has 0% on the tomatometer. Now, that’s because it’s in cinemas now and so lacking in reviewers, but even so, that seems incredibly harsh. It’s clearly a low budget movie, an indy that does look cheap in places - the producers clearly spent some money on a drone and were damned if they weren’t going to get maximum use out of it. So it did look cheaper than your average blockbuster, but I still thought it was a lot of fun.

My Life List has featured “watch a professional ballet performance” for a long time, and I’ve never quite got round to it. I’ve just recently realised why that is, considering how much I love the theatre and would grab any excuse to go. I have a weird obsession with ballet that manifests itself by me loving the behind the scenes activities – training and classes, rehearsal, choreography and dance schools – but then not being at all interested in the end result.

We know now that the NFL tried to quash some or all of this movie, and that the story behind this is no doubt a lot, lot worse. That explains why once the concussion findings have been published and the news is out there, the film gets a bit wobbly in its pacing - almost like it can’t decide whether to go full out on the good versus bad guys, and instead sits nervously in between the two.

Apple Music gets quite a lot of stick for its functionality and usability, and I can understand the complaints to a degree. However, I’ve used it constantly these past six months for my weekly album adventure and much more, so I’m listening to more music than I probably have before in my life. I’m comfortable with how it works and I love it being part of my iOS experience. There’s one feature I really would like, though, and that is a Reading List style place to save things for the future. If you use Safari, you’ll know it’s easy to save whatever web page you’re on to your Reading List so that you can revisit it at a later date. Or if you’re anything like me, save stuff that you take several months to get round to looking at.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this one before, it feels like it’s a film that’s part of the collective consciousness of the world, a piece of culture. And having now seen it, it’s also essentially an extended version of the first episode of Ugly Betty, which I loved.

Written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, you have to expect this book to be slightly crazy, pretty funny, and insanely well structured. It was all of those things. I’m not sure it was 100% to my tastes, but I did enjoy it, particularly the way all the characters seemed to be drawn inexorably towards each other.

The 2016 Wimbledon Championships drew to a close this past weekend with Williams and Murray taking their respective crowns and bringing to an end two weeks of spectacular tennis. I’ve never felt quite so on top of all the Wimbledon action as I have this year, well not since I once took a whole week off to watch nothing but the tennis. There are two reasons why I’ve managed to stay so informed. One is the brilliant Live at Wimbledon radio, which provided all day every day coverage either of everything going on across the grounds, or more specific channels for Centre Court and Court One. The other weapon in my knowledge arsenal was the fantastic Tennis Podcast.

I have to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy this one at all. There didn’t seem to be a clear angle with it - you can tell the author wanted to stick with rabbits that weren’t acting too human, and it was interesting to see where they didn’t understand human ideas, like the sea and bridges, but equally, these rabbits were capable of getting in a boat in a bid for freedom and rescuing each other from garden hutches.

Now, I have to be careful writing this post, because in our household there is one human who is utterly obsessed beyond comprehension with Taylor Swift, and just to be clear, it’s not me. I like Ms Swift, I think she’s very talented and pulled off an incredible feat switching from country to pop the way she did. 1989 is a really good album. I also like the stuff she does with her fans and the way she really seems to care about what’s going on around her. (That’s enough praise to get me out of trouble, isn’t it?)

Thought I only knew Iris from this one, it’s a stand out track for sure. It turns out I knew one or two others as well. Really engaging but gentle rock sound, and so reminiscent of Nineties TV, I could almost have been watching Dawson’s Creek as I listened.

Nice, relaxed and flowing sound, great layering and some interesting samples. So many guest stars, it’s almost a collaborative album than a Snoop one. Only real complaint is that it’s so long – twenty tracks!

I didn’t realise I was eagerly awaiting the fourth series of Orange is the New Black, not until the Netflix Twitter account started to count down to its release date. Then I remembered how much I enjoy the show, and how long it has been since we were last allowed a glimpse of what was going on at Litchfield Correctional Facility. The release of series four coincided with a period of time where I happened to be in front of a screen for a good portion of the day. Or five days. And that’s what it took me to watch it through - the first time I’ve really, truly, binge-watched something the way all the jokes suggest.

This was a fascinating one. I remembered from the trailer that it was going to be something of an action movie with big waves, but it wasn’t your traditional blockbuster. It was a lot more slow-moving, building tension every step of the way and really engaging with the character so that you care what happens in those horrifying conditions.

I wanted to like this more than I did. There are a couple of classics, obviously. You’ve Got a Friend is a wonderful song. But the rest of it I could take or leave, and it annoyed me that I wasn’t as on board as I hoped.

You almost can’t tell they have changed the lineup, good album, exactly as you would expect – fast paced rock, some of it sounds familiar from days gone by, but there are some interesting ideas too. Mix of track lengths make it quite an unpredictable listen.

Really loved this film, it was laugh out loud funny in a lot of places. Oddly, none of the characters were particularly sympathetic, and a couple of them were seriously annoying, but even with that, the script and the laughs shone through.

Turns out, it was a really good film. The start tells the story of a boy and a girl in love, but their situation so quickly changes and spirals out of control that you’re left wandering what on earth happened. The story moves somehow quite slowly, but keeps the tension ramping up so that there are moments that are properly edge-of-your-seat.

This was an interesting book, written about the author’s explorations of Nuristan in the late 1950s. The writing was sublime, soft and gentle, observant but not overly detailed, and with a dry humour that pokes fun at almost everything without being offensive.

I hadn’t really been paying attention to the BMW Group’s Next 100 celebration with concept cars ahoy - that is until I saw this video with their take on the future of Rolls Royce. “Are you ready?” the breathy voiceover lady oozes. Erm, not sure that I am actually!

I always find the idea of short story collections more exciting in principal than I usually find them in practice, and this one had more anticipation thanks to the names attached. It’s kind of cynical to say ‘we’re giving some authors a bigger stage thanks to Lee Child and Jeffrey Deaver’ but equally, they’re upfront and honest about it and it works! So no complaints here.

Good, foot tapping rock, very listenable but an album stacked full of songs that all sound exactly the same. You’ve got to really like what they’re selling here, but if you do, you’re onto a winner.

Thought it was going to be all ballads but it was more interesting than that. A little warbly in places, but if you’ve got a voice like that, why not use it? Some really good songs, all packed with emotion and written from the heart which makes them special.

This should have been so brilliant. What an amazing cast - give or take Kate Winslet and her dodgy Russian accent. But seriously, that final note about the characters filling the screen with their presence was so true, it’s just a shame they didn’t really have the script to help them along the way.

We were looking for something to take our minds off what had been a long week and an extremely mind-boggling (Brexit-filled) day. Who better to turn to than Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock? I can’t believe I haven’t seen this one already, given my love for Sandy, but it was the perfect film to rectify the situation.

The BBC Good Food Show has been on my to do list for a while, and this year I finally managed to find time to attend the show for a few hours. It’s bad timing really, because I haven’t been cooking or baking as much as I used to, but even so, I’m still keen on seeing what the best of the kitchen world has to offer. In all honesty, I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping the show would have innovation and cool kitchen tools, areas for increasing food knowledge, cooking skills and creating more interesting dishes. Generally, I just wanted a bit of inspiration.

Apple’s WWDC took place last week, and whilst the keynote speech that kicks the event off was interesting for its new developments introduced, it wasn’t my favourite part of the week. Apple have done a great job upping their game in terms of providing coverage of the conference for those who can’t make the trip. They stream all the sessions live, and record them all for later watching on demand.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, tragic as it was in places. Following the early stirrings of a life as a chef in a young boy with a lot to learn, we track him across the continents as his extended family move around a lot, eventually alighting in France. The bitter fight with the neighbour across the road is also fascinating, but then I found it started to lose its way.

I knew nothing about James except for two random songs, so this was a refreshing experience. Great album, the songs are all quite gentle pop and with that iconic voice, there’s a familiarity throughout the album (although it goes a bit wonky in the middle), making it fab for a comfort listen or as background music.

I was quite ambivalent about this album on the first run through, it all sounded much the same. Very Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know what you’re getting and not bad but not special. Second time through I was starting to pick out more interesting melodies and bass lines, so I think this one is definitely a grower.

I feel like I saw this Chinese elevated bus concept previously - perhaps at the drawings stage of design, but now there’s a scale model to show how it really would work. It looks incredible, wonderfully futuristic, and it’s a brilliant idea. BUT, I do get the feeling it wouldn’t work with human beings behind the wheel of the cars. What if someone has to get out for a second - or pull over? What if there’s a crash underneath it. Where do the lorries go?

I wouldn’t cook well with a camera up close like that. The pressure!

I struggled with sympathy for some of the storylines, because you know, I couldn’t care less about carrying on my genetic lines, but considering my cynicism the film actually did a good job. There was an interesting mix of successful and unsuccessful parenting units, and although there was some drama along the way, for the most part, it was all happy endings.