My niece is now two an a half, and, while her parents are working from home, she is finding a host of entertainment to get fixated on - some things run in the family, it would seem. I am regularly updated on what her new 'thing' is, and it's been making me think about when I was that age, and older, and what I latched onto ( Read more... )

Once it became clear I wasn't going to get any substantive work done yesterday, I decided to sit down finally and watch Mr Jones, which I'd bought off Google Play a couple weeks ago and not yet got round to ( Read more... )

It started with Magnitsky the Musical, a story about Russian tax fraud and government corruption, property markets, and the elections of 2016, rendered in indie folk ballads; incongruous, and yet somehow successful. Shortly afterwards, The Death of Stalin - simultaneous bumbling and horror at the top of Soviet power - finally turned up on Netflix ( Read more... )

I have finally caught up with Chernobyl, which aired on HBO last year around this time and elicited rapture from everyone everywhere. I don't know when it came out on DVD but I finally checked for it last week, and have been enjoying(?) the escape(?) from an atmosphere of apocalyptic gloom, to a time and place of even more apocalyptic gloom ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I did a movie review, but then it's been a while since I've been to see a movie, so that may explain it ( Read more... )

Last year I had the joy and privilege to work on Ethel & Ernest, an animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs' graphic novel about his parents. It is exactly the sort of animated film that would never get made Stateside, and exactly the sort of film I always wished I could work on, so you can imagine how chuffed I was to be a part of it ( Read more... )

The 'vintage' Disney season continues at Picturehouse, now onto films which came out during my childhood. I missed Little Mermaid last week, which I have mixed feelings about - on one hand, I don't think I've seen it in the cinema since I was seven, but on the other, I have seen it on DVD and as such I am not overflowing with regret that I missed ( Read more... )

This afternoon, thanks to Picturehouse's current 'Vintage Sundays' series of animated film screenings, I got to see Disney's 1967 Jungle Book on the big screen for the first time ( Read more... )

In 1948, Ealing Studios produced a film about Scott's Last Expedition. There were still quite a few survivors kicking around, and despite initial misgivings, most eventually came around to the idea of supporting it. Frank Debenham, who founded SPRI and was more or less the official keeper of the Terra Nova flame, did a fair amount of consultation ( Read more... )

I haven't seen many films since leaving LA. In part that may be because I knew too much of how they were made and they were more transparent than I wanted them to be; in part it was frustration that basic film grammar, artful cinematography, and sophisticated writing seemed to have gone out of fashion. For the most part, those I have seen, I've ( Read more... )