The Family Next Door (2025)

Based on a novel by Sally Hepworth, adapted by various writers, no clear evidence of a showrunner.

A woman posing as a journalist, Teresa Palmer, moves into a coastal close and starts nosily investigating her new neighbours. Who are property developer Bella Heathcote and photographer Bob Morley, new mum Phillippa Northeast and husband Tane Williams Acra, Jane Harber and depressed husband Daniel Henshall and gay couple Maria Angelico and Jane Harber. Plus Catherine McClements.

Their kids are all a bit of a nightmare in one way or another.

It takes a long time in six 40 minute episodes to understand what's going on and what she's searching for - too long, in my estimation. Which is one thing. But I thought the ending was terrible. (New sister doesn't want to know, her mum is shopped to the police.)

This Life - Season 2 (1997 Amy Jenkins)

The style isn't sustainable: everything in close up, whip pans, sudden edits. It's exhausting.

The Pantomime Bitch Queen turns up. Rachel - Natasha Little - is so passively grasping and insinuating we want to shout at her and hurl rotten eggs and fruit at her.

Egg has started work in a café. Millie is so nice to everyone - it's about time she wasn't. Then she has an affair and we go right off her

And Kira is trying to keep Joe at arm's length - will she push him away? Luisa Bradshaw-White was latterly in Eastenders for a mere 693 episodes. Steve John Shepherd was only in it for 314 episodes. We just saw him in the Silent Witness film Discovery - didn't even recognise him! And most recently in both seasons of Karen Pirie!

21 episodes.

The Best Silent Films

The Last Command (1927) Underworld (1928) and Docks of New York (1928). Josef von Sternberg.

7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). I was already a fan of silent, but Frank Borzage sent me on a journey in a big way. I encountered these three masterpieces in the Spring of 2026.

The Wind (1928). Victor Sjostrom.

The Crowd (1928) and The Big Parade (1925). King Vidor.

The Lodger (1927). Hitch.

The General (1926). Clyde Bruckman / Buster Keaton.

Pandora's Box (1929) / Diary of a Lost Girl (1929). G.W Pabst. Once you've met Louise Brooks, there's no turning back.

The Last Laugh (1924). Murnau.

The Student Prince (1927), So This Is Paris (1926) and The Marriage Circle (1924). Lubitsch.

Broken Blossoms (1919). D.W. Griffith.

Greed (1924). Eric von Stroheim. I was lucky enough to get hold of the four hour version that was broadcast on TCM.

Safety Last (1923). Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor. 

Man With a Movie Camera (1929). Dziga Vertov. One of the most stunning endings to a film ever.

Silent Witness - the missing episodes (1996)

Darkness Visible, by Ashley Pharoah, was originally episodes five and six of the first season of Silent Witness, but they're not available as part of the entire series on BBC iPlayer. You have to find the original DVD.

It's about a gay man who is locked up in a cell with a drunk man and found dead in the morning. The drunk man can't remember if he's done anything and is advised 'Anyone would push him away - it's only natural' so perhaps it's content like that the BBC were trying to disassociate with. Or it's the fact that we pretty much straight away figure out there's some kind of police cover up going on, which was deemed unsavoury?

Or maybe it was this quasi-torture by police moment:

Despite obstacles, Sam finds out, whilst reviving an old relationship with Brendan Coyle, now a poet. Who delivers a good speech about how Sam's dad should be remembered with affection, not solely as a victim.

Good cast includes Ken Stott, Michael Troughton, Philip Glenister and Ian Shaw, and Clare Higgins. Plus recurring detectives James Aubrey and Ruth Gemmell.

Interesting to reflect on the changes between these early shows and the version thirty years on. This one has a completely orchestral score, for example, and sounds like more work than the synth-led moderns. Also I noticed in the earlier ones the bodies in the morgue were always nude, which you would have though they really would be. But lately they're covered for modesty. Was that the BBC being over-woke?

The direction and editing is less snazzy (do you remember that season when the last shot of the episode blew out into white, for example?) The stories have generally remained good and hard hitting. The performances have generally been good.

Ashley Pharoah (who sounds like he should be black, but isn't unfortuately) started out as an Eastenders writer, progressed on to things like Life on Mars, Wild at Heart and The Living and the Dead. Made me think the BBC is a bit like one of the old film studios with lots of in-house talent that can be pushed in good directions. A great example being Sue Tully, who started out as a teenage actor in Grange Hill and Eastenders, but has developed into a respected director on things like Silent Witness, The A Word, Line of Duty and Strike.

Believe Me (2026 Jeff Pope)

The story of the victims of the Black Cab rapist, beginning with Aimee Ffion-Edwards (whose ex doesn't believe her) and taking in Miriam Petchie and Aasiya Shah (who cannot bear to tell her family). Danny Mays is the unrepentant bastard. Philippa Dunne and Rachael Stirling (who we just saw in Their Finest) take matters to court.

Unfortunately there were so many appalling police errors in the handling of the earliest victims that they were successfully sued.

Screenplay feels like it's a well balanced presentation of a true story. And remind us that only 3% of rape charges ever stick.

Four x 45 for ITV. Directed by Julia Ford, acror-turned-director, who all did Unforgivable (2025) and Showtrial Season 2 (2024).

The Mountain (1956 Edward Dmytryk)

After a somewhat dull looking studio plane crash, we find farmer Spencer Tracy in Chamonix. He's a famous mountaineer but the mountain doesn't like him any more. That will not deter his much younger brother Robert Wagner, whose character is totally irredeemable - he wants to loot the corpses of their money and valuables. Somehow Tracy won't let him do the climb alone - cut to doubles in long shots and studio set mountain climbing - quite tense, actually.

They get there - there's only a survivor! Anna Kashfi, you know, from Cowboy, and Sirk's Battle Hymn, pretending not to understand English (she was, reportedly, Welsh). Wagner immediately wants to kill her. I mean what a cunt! Why does Tracy put up with this at all? (In fact they were quite close on set.) Where Tracy attacks him the look on his face is sheer rage.

Franz Planer films all this without derision, and in VistaVision, and Daniel Amfitheatrof sets it to music. Ranald MacDougal wrote it from a short novel by Henri Trouat that Tracy had spotted some time before. With Claire Trevor, William Demarest as a priest, Richard Arlen, E.G. Marshall.

Tracy wears the same red shirt throughout

Q's sensible question was 'why didn't they just go up in a helicopter?' There are limitations to the height helicopters can reach - specialized ones have landed on Everest. I thought they said the summit was 6000 feet... which may have been beyond the reach of 1956 helicopters.

During filming Tracy and Wagner were in a cable car that partially broke down leaving them suspended thousands of feet in the air. They were of course rescued but Tracy 'looked twenty years older' than when he'd got in - that night was a drinking night, oh yes.

We wondered whether Wagner really was that unpleasant a person.

Lucky Star (1929 Frank Borzage)

A Frank Borzage production from 'Three Episodes in the Life of Timothy Osborn' by Tristram Tupper.

The third and final Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell pairing (though the couple would appear in several other films together). I think he was great. Observe here the energy he puts into the (first) scene where he's trying to make his legs work with crutches. Whilst he made plenty of talkies, his career wound down in the thirties, when he established the Palm Springs Racquet Club with Ralph Bellamy! He's my favourite new discovery.

This is real sweet. Farrell loses the power of his legs in WW1. Develops relationship with poor farm girl Gaynor and teaches and refines her. And, of course, they fall in love. But her horrible mother (Hedwiga Reicher) wants her to have nothing to do with the 'cripple', preferring her to marry ex soldier Guinn Williams, who's in fact a fraud. And we've already seen he's a lowlife from his behaviour in the war (to local women and to his own men).

In a somewhat incredible third act, struggling through the snow, Farrell remarkably gains his lower limb motion and catches her just before the wedding. Hurrah! 'Why don't your legs work?' she had enquired earlier. 'I'm saving them for a special occasion.' In the end, where she sees him standing upright and without aid, she sinks to her knees grabbing him around the legs and asks 'Is this the special occasion?' SWEET!

Great Borzagy moments - he washing her hair; then suggesting she washes the rest of her! The two looking at each other through the window which she has broken. The breakfast which has to take place with her sitting outside the door.

Absolutely beautifully photographed by Chester Lyons (also Bad Girl and Mad Love) and William Cooper Smith, and designed by Harry Oliver.

Like all these other silent Borzage pictures a William Fox film. He lost his fortune in the Wall Street Crash followed by losing control of the company the next year; Fox merged with Twentieth Century in 1935. I'm amazed to find good copies of these great old movies on YouTube!

The second half was shot with sound but I guess there was a silent print made.

One thing - no idea why it's called 'Lucky Star'.

Two Weeks in August (2026 Catherine Shepherd)

Jessica Raine and Damien Molony, Nicholas Pinnock and Antonia Thomas (and Maria Almeida), Leila Farzad and Hugh Skinner, plus the laziest au pair in the world Florence Banks. And the most annoying man on the island Tom Goodman-Hill, and Dolly Wells.

Friends gather in rather run-down villa on Greek island (actually Malta). Husband A snogs wife B; wife A has always fancied husband B. Wife A keeps seeing Greek Moirai who predict fates.

A generally annoying 8 x 45 BBC presentation which feels like the writer made it up as she went along. OK, that's also the way I write, but I mean it in a bad, unthought-through way. Then there's a fire and everyone has to run away. The music makes it sound like it's trying to be The White Lotus.

The Guardian says 'it will give you a well-earned break from bad TV' but I've also seen 'BBC viewers beg 'make it stop' as loathsome new psychological drama is slated'. We did laugh, but not I think at things we were supposed to laugh at. I found Raines' transition from super-nice to empowered new woman entirely unbelievable. The whole thing gets more staggeringly implausible as it goes along. Also never seems as hot as Greece would in August. And one minute they're walking everywhere, the next they have hire cars?

The River (1928 Frank Borzage)

 .. at least what's left of it. The Cinémathèque Suisse have restored what's left of the film and added in stills and titles to fill in the blanks to its current 52 minute running time. Thus two of the main characters we never see on film, and what looks like the highlight of the film - he rescuing her from the whirlpool - no longer survives. (The picture was also adapted to add sound in sections.)

'He'? 'Her?' Where are my manners? She is the alluring Mary Duncan, also to be seen in Murnau's City Girl (1930), he the deliciously diffident Charles Farrell (Borzage favourite from 7th Heaven and Street Angel). What does survive is the undeniable eroticism between the couple (there's something about her in that first dress!), which is fine as the plot overall sounded a bit melodramatic.

Unseen: Ivan Linow, Margaret Mann, Alfred Sabato, Bert Woodruff.

I think Borzage liked his lead actor to be a lot taller than the actress.

The A team is in evidence: DP Ernest Palmer and designer Harry Oliver, whose mining camp is another work of art.

Dinner Rush (2000 Bob Giraldi)

Possibly the inspiration for The Bear. Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata have set the film over one night in a busy Tribeca Italian restaurant (that's below the Village and near the East River). Owner Danny Aiello is dealing with the murder of partner by rival bookies. His son Edoardo Bellerini wants to run it not just cook. (Funnily enough his dad thinks the food poncey and not good like the old days.) Two gangsters are trying to muscle in; the sous chef is in debt to them. There's a pretentious art critic, and an unpleasant food critic, a detective and a loner at the bar. It all wraps together very satisfyingly.

Mostly unknown cast. Kirk Acevedo, Ajay Naidu, Vivian Wu, Polly Draper, Jamie Harris (bartender), Alex Corrado, Michael McGlone, John Corbett, Lexie Spurduto, Sandra Bernhard.

Photographed by Tim Ives (Fosse / Verdun, Girls, How To Make It in America), edited by Allyson C Johnson, who together catch well the furious pace of the large and busy kitchen, chefs and waiting staff, perhaps even better than Boiling Point did.

Yeah - we thought it was pretentious too

Another one that we'd last watched so long ago it was like seeing it for the first time.

Family Plot (1976 Alfred Hitchcock)

Loosely based on Victor Canning's 'The Rainbird Pattern', which features the two parallel stories, but then very much Hitchcockized with Ernest Lehman. To somehow completely contradict myself, it's quite un-Hitchcocky in a way, more plotty, more scenes of exposition, but the story and performances are fun, and the ending moves properly into his famous 'pure cinema' mode.

Lehman greatly disapproved of the ending which we have now but I think Hitch was right to stick to his version - in particular Barbara Harris's into camera wink at the audience.

Nice track in to diamond (DP Leonard J South):

Good casting of supporting characters as usual: Cathleen Nesbitt, Ed Lauter, Katherine Helmond, Nicholas Colosanto and Charles Tyner:

Their Finest (2016 Lone Scherfig)

Or, 'Mustard under a bomber's moon.'

Must watch the same director's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself again. And check out The Shift (Dag & Nat), two series hospital drama. Oh yeah... The Kindness of Strangers... that was good.

I thought about Blimp again whilst watching it and realised what an incredible achievement it was for the Archers to get that film made, with that subject matter, in colour, in World War 2.

It's very enjoyable.

'Cut it down by half.'
'Which half?'
'The half you don't need.'

The Goonies (1985 Richard Donner)

Frenetic, exhausting kids' adventure with highly questionable content, from a story by Steven Spielberg, written by Chris Columbus. With Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Corey Feldman (Stand By Me, The Lost Boys), Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once).

Can't believe it's by the director of Lethal Weapon. (He directed Superman too, which is why that gets a jokey reference.) Not funny and quite pukey.

Edited by Michael Khan.

Love Happens (2009 Brandon Camp & co-scr)

Grief counsellor Aaron Eckhardt has failed to face up to his own grief; Jen An helps. More serious than most rom coms; good.

With Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts, The Offer as Coppola), John Carroll Lynch, Judy Greer, Martin Sheen, Frances Conroy.

Bold and colourful photography from Eric Edwards. Edited by Dana Glauberman.

The Marriage Circle (1924 Ernst Lubitsch)

From the dates on the letters it was clearly filmed in 1923, at Warner Brothers. I think the most remarkable thing about this film today, over a hundred years ago, is the subtlety of the acting. There isn't a trace of theatrical over-gesturing - rather it's the slightest of expression changes and looks - no doubt all acted out for the cast by Lubitsch - that make it still fresh.

Adolphe Menjou is particularly funny in a deadpan way, from the outset where he can't find any clean socks, so goes back to bed. Marie Provost is his wife who develops a big crush on Monte Blue, himself married to her friend Florence Vidor (king's ex). She in turn is fancied by Blue's colleague Creighton Hale, leading to some delightful mix-ups, the best of which comes right at the end. Also features one of those awfully polite confrontations between rival lovers (cf. That Uncertain Feeling), decisive moments at doorways.

Paul Burn adapted Lothar Schmidt's play.

It was photographed by Charles van Enger. The first of Lubitsch's films at Warner Bros.

The Duchess of Duke Street (1976 John Hawkesworth)

Producer Hawkesworth brings his Upstairs Downstairs sensibilities (and filming style) to the BBC, as chef Gemma Jones defies the upper classes for her shot in early twentieth century London.

We seem to have missed the beginning (only the opening episode thankfully) and find herself already having made a good impression with a Major, Michael Culver (Roland's son) and Lord Bryan Coleman, but is pressed into marrying butler Donald Burton so she can be mistressed out to the Prince of Wales, Roger Hammond. That I find a bit much.

Familiar faces in June Brown, John Raply, Doreen Mantle, John Welsh, David Cater, Robert Hardy, Christopher Cazenove, Richard Vernon, Anthony Andrews.

She later starts a hotel, despite her husband trying to ruin her; has a baby, exposes fraudsters and adulterers. Entertaining series. 

Great scene in Lottie's Boy (writer Julia Jones) - argument between Louisa and Mary - Gemma Jones and Victoria Plucknett - great work from both. Plucknett's probably best known to Welsh audiences for Pobol y Cwm - the longest running Welsh soap!

There's also something insanely catchy about Alexander Faris's theme tune.

Calvary (2014 John Michael McDonagh)

16 August 2014:

Certainly hooks you in right from the off. Sinewy, brilliantly written and performed film addresses all sorts of issues and in Brendan Gleeson portrays the antithesis of the corrupt, child-abusing Irish Catholic priest - a type who we are reminded does actually exist (and from that point of view, it's quite refreshing). Has the same terrific sense of humour as The Guard but is considerably darker, deceptive, in fact, in the same way as Giu La Testa. One or two minor niggles over the editing (particularly in climactic scene) and feel it may have been over-directed (in church hall scene there are two too many shots) but these don't really detract from film's corrosive power and intelligence, which left me really moved.

24 July 2018:

Calvary is not as funny or entertaining as The Guard but boy oh boy, this is a serious and seriously impressive work, laced with laugh out loud moments of black humour, around the subject of a Good Priest in a time when such things don't seem to exist. And it's not just about religion either.

Brendan Gleeson's been sentenced to death ('How's Sunday week?) and it seems just about all the bastards in the village are potential suspects. These are Aiden Gillen, Chris O'Dowd, Dylan Moran, Isaach de Bankolé, Orla O'Rourke, Marie Josée Croze and Gary Lydon. Meanwhile Brendan's daughter Kelly Reilly has attempted suicide, writer M Emmett Walsh wants to go the same way, and Mícheál Óg Lane is a kid on the beach. David Wilmot is the crap priest.

And Domhnall Gleeson has a key cameo as a murderer.

Larry Smith shoots interiors warmly and exteriors bleakly. Chris Gill edited, Patrick Cassidy composed.

Is this a deliberate Ryan's Daughter reference?

It's just awesome - the ending and that lateral tracking montage and the final act of virtue that's so important - forgiveness. Gleeson is in awe of McDonagh's writing, which is 'so honest'. Interesting also to hear that McDonagh was at one point working the seven stages of grief into the script, and that he didn't himself know who the killer would be until the last 30 pages of the screenplay.

23 May 2026:

You just can't help but to love Larry Smith's images.

Who did kill the dog then?

Didn't even recognise Gleeson Jr.

An Education (2009 Lone Sherfig)

It had been so long since we'd seen Nick Hornby's adaptation of Lynn Barber's memoir that we'd forgotten what happened - which was very refreshing. Schoolgirl Carey Mulligan is seduced by older Peter Sarsgaard and introduced to culture and good things (though his mate Dominic Cooper is actually more suited to the girl). His girlfriend, Rosamund Pike, is elegant and thick. And of course they're not what they appear at all.

He manages ever so smoothly to get her parents Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour onside, despite his insistence that all she must do is work for an Oxford education. Thus the hypocrisy when she announces she's getting married and he says in that case, you don't need to go. And rather foolishly throws her education aside, much to the consternation of teacher Olivia Williams and headteacher Emma Thompson.

Mulligan is great; she won the BAFTA and was Oscar nominated. She had been in quite few things beforehand including Pride and Prejudice, Marple The Sittaford Mystery, The Waking Dead And When Did you Last See Your Father, My Boy Jack and The Greatest (2009).

Photographed by John de Borman, edited by Barney Pilling. James Norton is briefly glimpsed right at the end.

Dogfight (1991 Nancy Savoca)

Who? 1963. Nineteen year old Marine en route to Vietnam River Phoenix and buddies Richard Panebianco, Mitchell Whitfield (My Cousin Vinny) and Anthony Clark stop off in San Francisco and organise a 'dogfight' - trying to pick up the least attractive woman they can. River pulls folk singer Lili Taylor. Yes of course we've seen her before. She was in Mystic Pizza, Say Anything, Born of the Fourth of July and Short Cuts. Anyway despite his anger and constant bad language they fall for each other. The two leads are good (River has never not played a scene convincingly) and there's a moving ending - a very long embrace.

Bob Comfort wrote it. Good folk music soundtrack.

The Trouble with Mimi is - as I guessed - a made-up film.

Tim Squyres was supervising sound editor and assistant film editor.

The Lodger (1927 Alfred Hitchcock)

A print originally screened on Channel 4, in the days when they did risky and great things like that, with a good score by Paul Zaza.

This still works very well, has a wonderful fluidity and early evidence of the Master at work, just through different camera set ups and editing. And of course some of those bravura tricks like the glass floor and the quasi-religious almost-lynching ending, and a notable love scene. Film specialist Ivor Montagu was called in after producer C.M. Woolf shelved the film (Michael Balcon was the other producer); he removed many of the film's intertitles (there are refreshingly few left) and suggested the final mob scene needed reshooting to maximise the tension, all of which Hitch accepted happily.

Begins exactly the same way Frenzy does forty-five years later - a woman's dead body found by a group of people on the Embankment. Mysterious Ivor Novello rents a room nearby at the home of Marie Ault, Arthur Chesney and their daughter June Tripp (good; billed actually just as 'June'). Her boyfriend, also a detective, Malcolm Keen, become suspicious.. then jealous. Based on a novel by Belloc Lowndes, adapted by Eliot Stannard.

I wondered if Chesney was Edmund Gwenn at one point...'No, too old'. In fact he's his older brother!

An overhead shot of the mother descending the stairs is almost identical to one in Psycho.

Nicely photographed by Baron Ventimiglia in the German Expressionist style. Alma is credited as assistant director. Interesting designs of titles as well. C Wilfred Arnold designed the huge house sets.

Missed Hitch in room full of journalists. Thought I saw him in mob at end - he both confirmed and denied it was him.

Those baroque doors in the ball flashback...

Makes me think of something we've seen in Hitch's films before.

It's very good - has a certain feverish intensity to it.