Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
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gavia.bsky.social
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
@gavia.bsky.social
5.3K followers 220 following 2.5K posts
Film and TV critic. Co-host of the Overinvested movie podcast, co-editor of the Rec Center newsletter.

Bylines: TV Guide, Inverse, Vulture, Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, Empire, etc. she/her
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gavia.bsky.social
unreal cast list here
Set in 18th century Italy, the film stars Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Adele (in her movie debut), Ciarán Hinds, George MacKay, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Paul Bettany, Owen Cooper, Daniel Quinn-Toye, Hunter Schafer, Josephine Thiesen, Thandiwe Newton, Theodore Pellerin, Daryl McCormack, Cassian Bilton, Hauk Hannemann, and Lux Pascal.
November 12, 2025 at 5:52 PM
gavia.bsky.social
Here's all ten of the movies we reviewed on this ep, btw.

Speaking of Ben Whishaw, Claire made a VERY strong case to watch Peter Hujar's Day as soon as it comes out. Sounds amazing!!!
Wake Up Dead Man - Rian Johnson Mirrors No. 3 – Christian Petzold Pillion - Harry Lighton A Private Life – Rebecca Zlotowski It Was Just An Accident - Jafar Panahi Peter Hujar’s Day – Ira Sachs The Mastermind - Kelly Reichardt The Testament of Ann Lee – Mona Fastvold Hamnet - Chloé Zhao
November 6, 2025 at 9:10 PM
gavia.bsky.social
exactly where they belong 😇
chart depicting the pittsburgh penguins at the top of the NHL metropolitan division standings after 12 games
October 31, 2025 at 2:04 PM
gavia.bsky.social
6'5" and 5'8-9" for those who were wondering
Oscar isaac and Jacob Elordi on the Frankenstein red carpet
October 15, 2025 at 9:32 PM
gavia.bsky.social
hey what the fuck lol www.sportsnet.ca/nhl/article/...
SUNRISE, Fla. — Niko Mikkola had an assist on a goal that gave the Florida Panthers an 8-0 lead. Problem was, he'd been kicked out of the game a few minutes earlier and nobody noticed. Florida beat Tampa Bay 7-0 in the preseason finale for both clubs Saturday night, though the score was irrelevant. There were 65 penalties for 312 minutes on the stat sheet, including 13 game misconduct penalties — seven for Tampa Bay, six for Florida. The penalty count kept rising after the game, while officials were making sure everything that was called got logged.
October 6, 2025 at 4:51 PM
gavia.bsky.social
the origin story for Chase Infiniti's name is just SO good
Infiniti uses her middle name as her surname. She was named after the Batman Forever (1995) character Chase Meridian, played by Nicole Kidman, and Buzz Lightyear's line "To infinity and beyond" from Toy Story (1995).
October 3, 2025 at 1:25 PM
gavia.bsky.social
For Halloween season, I've put together a Letterboxd list of EVERY HORROR MOVIE we've reviewed on Overinvested!

Click through for links to episodes and show notes. letterboxd.com/hellotailor/...
Letterboxd screencap showing a list of horror movie posters. Letterboxd screencap showing a list of horror movie posters. Letterboxd screencap showing a list of horror movie posters.
October 1, 2025 at 3:27 PM
gavia.bsky.social
I'm in Orkney this week for an intensive tour of neolithic heritage sites, and who do I spot but our old pal John Rae, wrongfully discredited for uncovering the truth of the lost Franklin expedition!!
statue of explorer john rae in orkney
September 23, 2025 at 9:59 AM
gavia.bsky.social
this piece goes into the history of star trek's various alien villains, but above all it's about SNW's recurring theme of genetic determinism, which came to a head when the heroes imprisoned an entire race in transdimensional superhell because they're supposedly "evil itself."
In the context of Star Trek's legacy as a work of political science fiction, what does an intrinsically evil race represent? And what does it mean when the heroes defeat them by banishing them to another dimension, casting a human Federation officer as their biologically determined border guard? Compared to the allegorical underpinnings of the Klingon and Cardassian war storylines, this finale suggests some deep misunderstandings about what Star Trek is meant to stand for, sending an ominous message for the show's final two seasons.
September 18, 2025 at 10:57 PM
gavia.bsky.social
I knew virtually nothing about the show beforehand so when this moment hit I was like ascending to another plane. WHAT a great interpretation of hades.
Lover, you were gone so long Lover, I was lonesome So I built a foundry In the ground beneath your feet Here, I fashioned things of steel Oil drums and automobiles Then I kept that furnace fed With the fossils of the dead Lover, when you feel that fire Think of it as my desire
September 16, 2025 at 2:59 PM
gavia.bsky.social
one of the greats. highly recommended Clearcut (apparently Greene's favourite of his own filmography), a gripping and angry political thriller about the conflict between an indigenous community and a logging company.
poster for the movie clearcut starring graham greene
September 1, 2025 at 11:25 PM
gavia.bsky.social
cronenberg's crash: maybe my fav of any movie I've seen all year? I'm nothing if not predictable.
letterboxd screencap of four movies: only the river flows, cronenberg's crash, fritz lang's m, mobile suit gundam 1.
August 1, 2025 at 11:15 PM
gavia.bsky.social
back from my annual birdwatching retreat!!
scottish seaside landscape with overcast sky pencil sketch of a foggy landscape and some individual birds including puffins a d a seagull a group of puffins on a rock pencil sketch of two seagulls
July 19, 2025 at 6:14 PM
gavia.bsky.social
tbh if you just plopped a house into the foreground here, you'd basically have a thomas kinkade painting. so this satirical survey was bang on the money.
one of thomas kinkade's legendarily lucrative paintings of a rural house with glowing windows.
July 2, 2025 at 1:31 PM
gavia.bsky.social
the results of this project are so funny because almost every country's "most wanted" style of art is a benign landscape, and their least wanted is an abstract bunch of squares... except the Netherlands, where everyone was like "please give me an amorphous blob, I'm SICK of historical interiors."
the netherlands' "most wanted" style of art, an abstract multicoloured gradient the netherlands' "least wanted" style of art, a vaguely historical warm interior scene with a cat and some fruit
July 2, 2025 at 1:13 PM
gavia.bsky.social
didn't pick up on this the first time round, but Andor introduces an in-universe brand of legal stimulants known as "peezos" that you can buy in a little pez tube. the immigration patrol try to get some at the general store on mina-rau, and cassian's niamos girlfriend asks for them in s1.
Andor screencap showing cassian holding a tube of peezos at a shop on coruscant
June 18, 2025 at 10:39 PM
gavia.bsky.social
elderflower cordial season!!
metal pan full of elderflowers and lemons
May 29, 2025 at 5:09 PM
gavia.bsky.social
some further thoughts on the Smokestack twins and Sinners' potential connection to the early-1930s origins of gangster cinema: www.tumblr.com/hellotailor/...
One thing I forgot to mention in this ep is Sinners’ placement within Hollywood history, as a story set specifically in 1932. That’s right in the middle of the Pre-Code era, when the foundational three gangster movies came out (Scarface, The Public Enemy and Little Caesar) - and there’s a ton of thematic overlap between those films and the arc of the Smokestack twins, whose backstory draws from the real history of Al Capone and the Chicago mob. "Pre-Code" refers to a brief period of American filmmaking before the Hays Code kicked in, tightening the censorship guidelines around sex, violence, profanity, etc. A lot of movies from this era explored anxieties stemming from the Great Depression: dramas about poverty and class divides, comedies about sugar daddies and scams, and crime fiction that tapped into the public obsession with famous gangsters like Al Capone. Audiences in the early 1930s LOVED gangster movies, sparking a minor moral panic over whether these films glorified criminal behaviour. The big three Pre-Code gangster movies all focus on young, ambitious, violent men from immigrant backgrounds (Irish and Italian), establishing a framework for decades of gangster cinema. In Sinners, the Smokestack twins echo that lineage, presented as troubled antiheroes who make their fortune through organized crime in Chicago. Shaped by societal constraints and a desire to succeed within an unjust system, they follow a classic “rise and fall” arc that ends in violence.
May 27, 2025 at 11:57 PM
gavia.bsky.social
off-the-charts scoundrel performance from douglas fairbanks jr in the 1937 prisoner of zenda.
douglas fairbanks jr posing rakishly in a historical military uniform douglas fairbanks jr wearing a historical military uniform in the prisoner of zenda movie douglas fairbanks jr smoking a cigarette
May 19, 2025 at 9:35 PM
gavia.bsky.social
"I always thought that Syril kind of wants to be beaten up, actually, at this point." - Kyle Soller on the events of Andor 2x8.
In the midst of the massacre, he spots Cassian, "the object of his obsession from Season 1, whom he has come to blame for all the negative things in his life for the past four years." By this point, Soller believes that Syril isn't even thinking about what he's doing. He doesn't actually notice that Cassian is aiming a gun at Dedra Meero across the plaza; he just attacks on pure feral instinct. "He's in such a primal state of transition, it's like he's leaving a cult. He can't believe that up is up and down is down, and that the sky is actually blue anymore." "I always thought that Syril kind of wants to be beaten up, actually, at this point. But he's been gifted this superhuman strength by the revelations of the last ten minutes, this life force being released within him that he can go toe to toe with Cassian," he continued. "Yeah… I always thought he really just wanted to hurt himself for the hurt that he had delivered to the Ghormans."
May 13, 2025 at 10:49 PM
gavia.bsky.social
the abrupt record-scratch lowering of expectations i just experienced after seeing this description for the protagonist of noah hawley's new Alien spinoff:
Sydney Chandler as Wendy, a woman who has the body of an adult and consciousness of a child.
May 13, 2025 at 3:42 PM
gavia.bsky.social
Andor has made some very thoughtful choices WRT spoken language, and how it relates to political structures within the Empire.

I loved the decision to make Ghorman a bilingual planet, where everyone is fluent in Basic for work purposes, but speaks Ghor during private/political gatherings.
Contrasting with Chandrila or Kenari, Ghorman appears to be fully bilingual. The Ghor use their native language in private, but speak fluent Basic due to the planet’s reliance on offworld trade. As tensions mount between the locals and the Imperial interlopers, Ghor also becomes the language of rebellion. These three episodes include more subtitles than any other installment in the franchise, usually translating scenes where Ghorman citizens debate their plans for political resistance. Created by dialect coach Marina Tyndall and performed by French actors, the Ghor language sounds distinctly French. Like all of Andor’s allusions to real-world cultures, this choice is far from coincidental. Fighting an occupation from the famously Nazi-inspired Galactic Empire, the Ghorman Front invites comparisons with the French Resistance during World War II—a direct source of inspiration for the look of characters like Enza Rylanz.
May 6, 2025 at 10:44 PM
gavia.bsky.social
still thinking about the irish folkdance sequence in Sinners. really captured the eeriness of old stories about the witches' mass. especially when compared to the big club scene, because that's all about musical heritage while the other has people hypnotised into dancing to a stranger's tune.
black and white illustration of a witches sabbath black and white illustration of a witches sabbath with a satanic deity at the center
April 28, 2025 at 9:41 PM
gavia.bsky.social
I keep thinking about the ways in which Andor builds on vintage Star Wars DNA. When Cassian gets arrested in S1, it's because he's accosted by a random trooper - just like Obi-Wan and Luke in the "these aren't the droids you're looking for" scene, where they only escape because they have the Force.
In Star Wars: A New Hope, there's no distinction between the Empire's law enforcement and its military, introducing stormtroopers as an all-purpose army who guard prisoners, battle Rebel soldiers, and question civilians at gunpoint on the streets of Tatooine. The iconic "these aren't the droids you're looking for" scene takes place because Luke and Obi-Wan get asked for ID during a traffic stop, a dynamic that Andor expands upon with its top-down view of the Empire's fascist legal system.
April 25, 2025 at 7:36 PM
gavia.bsky.social
lmao god
Some viewers simply prefer other pairings for the characters and think putting them together is bad — which is standard fandom beef — but others seem to hate the idea of shipping anyone on the show at all, which is weirder and more sinister. This is not exactly a new phenomenon, but it is a little reactionary. These “No-romo” fans imagine some mythological bygone era where fans “watched programs like normal people” (which literally never happened) and didn’t write fan fiction that could sully their VERY SERIOUS TV program with the dirtiness of imagining characters hooking up with each other.
April 23, 2025 at 2:43 PM