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Thanks all, I now see it! Absolutely weird that I must have missed it. Made me pinch myself. My apologies for having thrown a pebble in the pond.

I woke up at 4 am thinking about this puzzle, with which I am still really struggling. I am not quite at the point of delving into the comments for help, but in the meantime I have come up with a new (I think!) portmanteau acronym: GW(TAF)IT.

A(n) (nearly) impossibly clever puzzle.I got there in the end but with respect to the 8 'review'' clues was unable to solve any of them until after I had worked out the source and back calculated. It made me feel slightly dissatisfied: like I'd solved it but not really been clever enough to "properly" solve it. Anyway, as my children say, that's a "me issue". The puzzle is brilliant. Thank you Smudge.

I think you're being a bit hard on yourself, EsPeBe. I don't entirely share others' admiration of this puzzle, because, as you discovered, it can be solved without solving any of the 8 special clues. The source is most easily identified from the other clues' letters, and then each verse can be matched without too much difficulty to the entries. In a way, the eight special clues are a distraction. There's quite a bit of embroidery in this puzzle but the solution and the construction itself are fairly straightforward.

mack, I found this an extremely enjoyable puzzle. For me the eight thematics plus alterations were great fun. As I commented earlier, for me the distraction was the preamble. Chacun a son gout!!

Lovely puzzle, with some very fine clues and wordplay, including (especially?) several of the thematics. I don’t think I’d quite agree that the puzzle can be fully “solved” without using the eight thematics at all — sure, you can surmise what the unches might be, and try to match them up with definitions, which is indeed exactly what I did, but there’s a lot of guesswork there: I wouldn’t have been happy to send it in until I’d gone through seeing how each is obtained from a review, and I think that’s still a key (and fun) step even if, as I did, it’s the last bit you do and only confirms what you’d tentatively put in! And in a couple of cases, like the already mentioned 37a, you couldn’t be entirely sure which spelling was required until figuring out the review. And the thematics were so groan-inducingly ingenious that I’m glad there were several ways around to give me confidence! Many thanks smudge, for the latest in a run of cracking puzzles this year already.

I take it no one else has had stats through yet? Just checking :-)

PS I do agree that this was a preamble that bamboozled, but just diving in to see if it would make sense later worked — because it then did! A key realisation for me was that while reading the whole source wasn’t required, reading some part of it was! But that part is in wiki entries, so quite fair. The mention of “two titles overlapped” was a bit curious: maybe “combined” would have been better, as one title is an extension of the other. I guess the key point was that both are needed to get all the reviews (unless you have wiki to cheat/shortcut with 🤣).