Down Cemetery Road (2025 Morwenna Banks)

Something about the Darren Boyd - Adeel Akhtar interaction struck me as overdone and hammy. But generally plot of missing girl, government cover-up and seedy private eye firm is intriguing - a bit of Strike to it, a bit of Slough House. Ah - it's from a Mike Slow Horses Herron novel (his first, one of a series of four), adapted by Morwenna Banks in eight episodes. And I'm not sure it's that well written. The 'funny' bits aren't funny and it suffers from an uncertainty of tone.

Emma Thompson looks great in silver hair and leathers.

With Ruth Wilson and some other people. Who are Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Fehinti Balogun, Sinead Matthews (The Boat That Rocked, Pride and Prejudice), Tom Goodman-Hill, Tom Riley, Ken Nwosu.

It's not really a TV programme it's an Apple!

It's not really Oxford but Bristol!

Autumn Leaves (1956 Robert Aldrich)

Aldrich would of course work with Joan Crawford again in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? This is a more soapy affair as she (then about 49) resists the advances of younger Cliff Robertson (who we probably know best for Three Days of the Condor) until they marry... then the ex wife turns up. But all is not what it seems and Robertson turns out to have considerable mental problems (the source for which aren't mentioned, though he's clearly suffered an emotional shock seeing his father and wife together). Which makes it somewhat more interesting than it might have been. 

Written by Jean Rouverol and husband Hugo Butler - uncredited as blacklisted, while on the run from HUAC in Mexico - and Lewis Meltzer and Robert Blees.

With Vera Miles (wouldn't have recognised her), Lorne Greene, Ruth Donnelly. Photographed by Charles Lang. Columbia.

Only Murders in the Building - Season 5 (2025 John Hoffman)

Concerning the death of trusty doorman Lester, his involvement with the mob (Bobby Cannavale) and a trio of billionaires who are gambling in the Arconia's basement - these are Logan Lerman, Renee Zellweger and Christoph Waltz. Also new in the building - Beanie Feldstein.

Lovely gambling set - Patrick Howe is the production designer.

Different writers / directors each episode, it seems. It's getting a bit silly but is still fun.

These Americans and their European mangled pronunciations, though. It's bad enough hearing them say 'Coe-nyac' and 'rizz-oh-toe' but to hear supposedly Italian-Americans call their grandmother 'Noe-nah' and talk about visiting 'Poe-zit-ah-noe' is just disgraceful.

Night Nurse (1931 William Wellman)

Has a brilliantly modern opening of the POV of an ambulance driver and the mad dash through streets to the hospital. We had to watch it twice. Then a more conventional tale begins of Barbara Stanwyck joining hospital staff with Joan Blondell and the usual hi-jinks, though plot turns begin when she treats an injured (but cheerful) bootlegger Ben Lyon. Then things take a really perverse twist. They begin private care of two children in a rich private home. Their mother is always (nastily) drunk and the the brutish chauffeur (Clark Gable) seems to be running things, and the two children they're supposed to be looking after are being starved to death. The combination of this somewhat shocking storyline and the scenes of drunken depravity give it a hard, pre-Code edge which should never have been outlawed.

Oliver Garrett adapted Grace Perkins' novel. There's a most satisfying pay off.

Some of the direction / Barney McGill's camera are still at little rudimentary but overall the 71 minute film moves in a way that modern streaming things somehow don't.

Charles Winninger (Destry Rides Again) is the nice doctor. Stanwyck displays a nice line in defiant resistance.

Five Daughters (2010 Philippa Lowthorpe, scr Stephen Butchard)

Rather than the focus being on the police trying to find the killer, Butchard chooses to focus on the unfortunate victims all killed in the weeks before Christmas of 2006 in Ipswich, and the circumstances that led them into prostitution - heroin, mainly. We felt so sorry for the poor things freezing on the streets. And the impossible jobs the mothers have.

The victims: Jamie Winston, mum Juliet Aubrey, brother Al Weaver (Grantchester).
Eva Birthistle, mum Sarah Lancashire, sister Vicky McClure.
Natalie Press (My Summer of Love, Red Road, Wasp), mum Kate Dickie, sister Holliday Grainger.
Aisling Loftus, boyfriend Martin Compston.
Lauren Socha.

The one that got away: Kierston Wareing.

Law and order: Ian Hart, Adam Kotz, Lisa Millett, Christopher Fairbank, Anton Lesser.

Drug clinic: Sean Harris and David Bradley.

And, Joseph Mawle.

It's all done with a good deal of sensitivity and good acting so full marks to Lowthorpe.

The standout scene - Harris getting up and addressing the residents with the true nature of the problem. He's been steadily working, appearing in Mission Impossible films for one, recently in The Gold. He had so impressed us in Southcliffe and Red Riding.

DP Chris Seager. Editor David Thrasher, Music Peter Salem.

You'd think it would have been a big award winner but BAFTA only nominated Press and Butchard.

As we thought at the time, the girls would at least have been much safer in a legal brothel - but no, of course that would be too much to ask.

The Big Bluff (1955 W. Lee Wilder)

I don't think Billy's older brother Willie had ever seen one of his much more famous sibling's films, or if he did, he wasn't paying attention. This film is so crudely directed it's almost like he had never seen a film before.

Which of course makes it quite funny.

The Big Sleep's Martha Vickers, heir to a fortune, is dying of a weak heart (or a Mysterious Hollywood Illness) and travels to California to recuperate (or die, anyway) with chaperone Rosemarie Stack. There they meet good doctor Robert Hutton and chancer John Bromfield, who's having an affair with married 'dancer' Eve Miller. (That 'dance' she performs near the beginning is laugh-out-loud funny.)

So Bromfield's plan is to marry Vickers and inherit when she dies, but she soon starts perking up and he needs to take another course of action.

The twist, though very clumsily pulled off, is quite neat, written by Frank Freidberger from a story by Midret Lord.

The print we saw which TPTV had carefully excavated from a land fill site was very blurry and full of amusing end of reel sploshes, which all adds to the fun. Wilder chooses some very odd angles to shoot from:

So it's a crappy load of fun. A Planet Pictures release with an unknown crew.

The Nice Guys (2016 Shane Black & co-scr)

Hilarious moment where Ryan interrupts an award Russell is presenting here.

I know, we keep watching it, but Q wanted something Christmassy so I suggested Shane Black (well actually I suggested Shane Meadows before getting the right writer-director) but actually, apart from one Christmas song in the background in a bar near the end, this is the least Christmassy Black.

Things happen in Shane Black films that just don't happen in others. For example, there's a scene where Russell Crowe pulls out a gun and shoots - he misses the bad guy but a woman in the apartment behind is the unintended and unexpected victim - and it shouldn't be funny but it is.

'It's Shane!' I kept insisting - but I've no idea why.

Marriage Story (2019 Noah Baumbach & scr)

This is a subtle masterpiece, really, and we couldn't help but feel it may have been based on experiences that were real to Baumbach, whose parents split up when he was young and who himself divorced.

And you're not on the side of Scarlett Johannson (who is beautifully un-made up in a lot of it) or Adam Driver, who have both made mistakes. Both were Oscar nominated but it's Driver who made me cry - twice. The first is the powerful moment where he angrily tells Scarlett that she wishes she were dead - and through the anger you can still tell he's disgusted at himself for saying it. The film and screenplay were also nominated but in the end it was just Laura Dern that won. Good NYC vs LA stuff too.

Merrit Weaver, Ray Liotta, Wallace Shawn, Julie Hagarty, Alan Alda.

Robbie Ryan shot it on 35mm Kodak film, Randy Newman provides the score and Jennifer Lame edited with some great moments like the cutting between them as they close her gate.

For the second time this weekend I didn't realise until taking the screen shot that it was filmed in 1.66:1.

Films of the Year 2025

Coup de Grace

Shoah. And, while we're on the subject, The Zone of Interest.

Adolescence

A Real Pain

The latest season of Blue Lights.

The old films of Anthony Mann and John Alton like Border Patrol and T-Men. And Body and Soul.

Disclaimer.

Jay Kelly.

One Shot with Ed Sheeran (2025 Philip Barantini)

Incredibly well rehearsed, set up, orchestrated, one take (is it though - getting out of that taxi?? - yes it is, I double-checked) vanity project for Ed Sheeran is an amazing experience (though as I've said before, Soy Cuba did it all first). Nyk Allen is the DP responsible for this amazing trick, with a team of brilliant operators, who at one point attach the camera to a drone so it can float around New York.

We were amused to see there's an editor credited - Tom Jarvis!

Jay Kelly (2025 Noah Baumbach & co-scr)

The glorious opening crane shot in a film studio, with its overlapping dialogue, is not only a remarkable piece of work from Linus Sandgren (and choreographer David Neumann) but also seems like an homage to the opening of The Player. But actor / star George Clooney's descent into memories quickly becomes a very Fellini-like movie, 8 1/2 in particular - there's a photo of Marcello Mastroianni in it, as a clue, and Clooney ends up in the forest in a white suit. But whether or not that was Baumbach's intention what emerges is a really fun watch as the director confronts himself and his relationship with his crew - mainly agent Adam Sandler.

Also interesting faces in Tuscan dinner party scene - and those direct into-camera introductions (very Stardust Memories, which also riffed on Fellini) and the vicar eating two ice creams. Scenes on train with light bouncing around - terrific - magic hour chase off train.

It was co-written with Emily Mortimer who plays another long-suffering member of the retinue.

Eclectic cast, with Billy Crudup (scene in which he 'acts' is sensational), Grace Edwards, Riley Keough, Laura Dern, Patrick Wilson, Stacy Keach, Jim Broadbent, Lenny Henry, Eve Hewson, Janine Duvitsky, Thaddea Graham, Isla Fisher, Charlie Rowe (young Clooney), Louis Partridge (young Crudup).

Great music (can I say Rota-ish) from Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, Battle of the Sexes, Don't Look Up), noticeably well edited by Valerio Bonelli and Rachel Durance.

And a fabulous and moving performance from George Clooney.

Q said after it only was awarded 6.7 on IMDB - 'I would have given it more like eight and a half' she said, without any trace of irony.

Actually, it's also Wild Strawberries. And Clooney to himself in the mirror - Baisers Volés?

It wasn't until I did the screen shots that I realised it's also shot in the very cool European aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Shot on Kodak 35mm. I guess Robbie Ryan was busy shooting Yorgos Lanthimos's latest, Bugonia.

We think it's Baumbach's best film and undoubtedly one of the Films of the Year.

Prisoner 951 (2025 Stephen Butchard)

Edited by Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, photographed by Charlotte Bruus Anderson.

A most Kafkaesque situation from the Iranians - '"tell them to make the deal" - it's not very helpful, is it? Then the moment the debt repayment meeting is adjourned and two days later she's charged with more fictional crimes.

The Iranians with their lies and hostility are matched by the duplicity and callousness of the Brits. We'd forgotten Boris Johnson going public with the erroneous story that she's been training journalists - and didn't apologise.

Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes are the unfortunate couple. Oh - that's who he is. I thought he was some unknown. They're good. The director is Phillippa Lowthorpe, who directed Misbehaviour (also edited by Úna) and, back in 2010, Five Daughters - which Butchard also wrote.

The series ends reminding us that over seventy female political prisoners still languish in that prison ward. That solidarity between them is one of the hopeful facets of the film.

Young Woman and the Sea (2024 Joachim Rønning)

I only even heard of this, tucked away as it is on Disney+, because it's another fine piece of work from Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. But the true story of Trudy Ederle's fights against illness, society, her 'trainer', her family, the media, sexism etc etc. and her triumph at not only being the first woman to swim the channel but to have done it two hours faster than her closest male counterpart is rich and wonderful. Jeff Nathanson tells the tale, basing it on the non-fiction account by Glenn Stout. He (Nathanson) wrote Catch Me If You Can and worked with Rønning on Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge in 2017.

Daisy Ridley I remembered correctly has been in some Star Wars films, also Mr Selfridge, and Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express. She and her swimming doubles are fine, and there's good support from Kim Bodnia and Jeanette Hain as her parents and Tilda Cobham-Hervey her sister; with Stephen Graham a welcome presence in the film's final section. Plus Chris Ecclestone, Glenn Fleshler (promoter), Sian Clifford (trainer), Alexander Karim (French contestant). The French Contestant sounds like a Wes Anderson film.

Music by Amelia Warner, photographed by Oscar Faura (and underwater by Peter Zuccarini), production designer Nora Takacs Ekberg.

Hurray!

Van Gogh, we were both thinking

Why though isn't it The Young Woman and the Sea? Or - Young Woman and Sea?

The Roses (2025 Jay Roach)

Tony McNamara (The Great, The Favourite, Poor Things) adapted Warren Adler's 'The War of the Roses' without his distinctive black comedy; the most innovative thing about this version is the sarcastic repartee between the two Brits - Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who also exec produced - and how it's received by their American friends. Cue dinner party scene where the Yanks try to do it themselves and fail.

Kate McKinnon, Andy Samberg, Ncuti Gatwa, Sunita Mani, Zoe Chao, Jamie Demetriou, Allison Janney.

It's rather over-edited. We quite enjoyed it - wasn't the best or worst thing we'd seen.

It was actually filmed in Devon. It was? No way!

The Man Between (1953 Carol Reed)

Claire Bloom travels to Berlin to visit her brother (Geoffrey Toone) and his German wife, Hildegarde Knef, who seems to be up to something. Then somewhat shifty James Mason turns up, and the plot thickens. Bloom is radiant in earlyish role; Mason's accent less convincing.

Good on location filming of the wintry city by Desmond Dickinson, with Reed throwing in his famous Dutch tilts here and there.

Wasn't quite sure the lapse into romantic was working but the ending - all flight and tension - is highly successful.

Good support from Aribert Wäscher as the ruthless East German and Ernst Schröder as the agent he's after.  Schröder was a noted theatre actor, also appeared in The Longest Day and The Odessa File.

We know Knef from Fedora but one of her first films was the important German post-war drama Die Mörder sind unter uns in 1946.

Written by Harry Kurnitz, from a story by Walter Ebert. Music: John Addison. Production design: Andrej Andrejew. Camera: Denys Coop, Robert Day. Editor: Bert Bates.

Slow Horses: Season 5 (2025 Will Smith)

Naughty Libyans are at work using classic MI5 destabilizing tactics.

I could not work in Slough House nor for Lamb. He and Ho remain thoroughly unpleasant characters.

Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Aimee Ffion-Edwards, Tom Brooke, Christopher Chung. Working with Kristen Scott Thomas: Ruth Bradley, Cherelle Skeete, James Callis ('front desk'). Nick Mohammed, Abraham Popoola (The Curse, Cruella), Victoria Hamilton.

Death by paint pot is quite amusing.

Rubbish of the Year

Too Much. Lena Dunham thing. Did at least finish it.

Etoile. Amy Sherman-Palladino thing about ballet. No! Couldn't get past first episode! Didn't even finish the first episode!

Insomnia. Very daft Vicky McClure thing.

Cold Water and The Guest. Both linked by Eve Myles, who should know better. Both unbelievable rubbish.

Dope Girls. Just couldn't get into it.

Girl Friend. More unbelievable rubbish... but I think audiences realise it is. Certainly the ones on Gogglebox seem to.

Zero Day. Robert de Niro President thing. Just never went further than episode 1.

The Iris Affair. Giant super-computer thing? Who commissions this stuff?

Paradise. Dan Fogelman's gone mad. Or it's just not our thing.

Hostage. Farcical Suranne Jones thing.

Suspicion. Oh yeah - that one. More fucking rubbish.

The Assassin. The Williams Brothers. One episode enough.

The Forsytes. You just know immediately whether something is going to work, Bad script => bad acting.

The Ridges. Really annoying over-edited and filmed in that irritating in-out zoom style that I thought and hoped had gone out of fashion.

Murder Before Evensong. 1980s priest-copper Grantchester rehash. Boring. Matthew Lewis weirdly (intentionally?) evoking Bertie Carvel in Dalgleish.

Summerwater. Shenanigans at holiday park in Scotland. Seemed so far fetched just couldn't even finish episode 1. Complete with erotic ghosts. Who writes this stuff?

I Know This Much Is True. Well, I don't know it was rubbish, but when it opened, identical twin Mark Ruffalo cut his own hand off, and we thought 'Yeahhh.... Not sure if this is really our baaaaaag'.

Wild Cherry. Can't remember. Seemed pale and insincere. Also  that it had a 5/10 rating didn't help.

Airport 1975 (1974 Jack Smight)

They didn't really need to make Airplane - this is it already.

Surely a contender for the so-bad-it's-good movie of the year.

Really bad dialogue - Don Ingalls is the credited *writer*. Badly directed and edited.

And, an extremely eclectic cast. Karen Black, Charlton Heston, George Kennedy, Effrem Zimbalist Jr., Susan Clark, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Dana Andrews, Roy Thinnes, Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson (somehow looking younger than she did in Sunset Boulevard!) and Nancy Olson (also from that film).

First saw it on 21 July 1975. Thought it was 'suspenseful' and had 'good colour photography'! (Philip Lathrop.)

Midnight in Paris (2011 Woody Allen & scr)

We celebrate Woody's 90th birthday with his last hit and his last Oscar (he was also nominated as director) - but you don't need an excuse to watch his exploration of 'Golden Age thinking' (he may well have come up with this phrase). He writes the various characters so brilliantly and then a gallery of amazing people perform them brilliantly. And it's also as much a love letter to Paris as Manhattan was to New York.

I love that Gil reads about himself in the past through Adriana's journal (Carla Bruni's reading of this and the way the camera moves is exceptional), and that he only cottons on to his fiancee having an affair through the intuition of Ernest Hemingway!

We went from Rachel McAdams and one Wilson to Rachel McAdams and another.

Why this one so much? I've always loved time travel stuff I suppose as far back as The Time Tunnel and The Time Machine. And Paris is such a great city. 

The Family Stone (2005 Thomas Bezucha & scr)

You don't hear much about the Bezuchas these days. well...  he did do Let Him Go.

For once Sarah Jessica Parker is cast absolutely right as an uptight and thoroughly unlikable women who somehow Dermot Mulroney has fallen for and somehow his brother Luke Wilson finds irresistible. What a weird family. Mum Diane Keaton, playing it with a steely edge, is dying, but we didn't really need the epilogue with them celebrating Christmas without her. Christmas? Yes, it's a sort of Christmas film.

Rachel McAdams is good too as the disruptive sister. With Craig Nelson, Ty Giordano, Brian White, Elizabeth Reasor, Paul Schneider, and - top billed - Claire Danes.

We see / hear the original 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas', sung by Judy Garland from Meet Me in St Louis, after she's changed it. See here. The original went ' ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas // It may be your last // Next year we may all be living in the past.’ I think these things need to be told.

Michael Giacchino wrote the score. And Jonathan Brown shot it. Jane Ann Stewart designed it and Jeffrey Ford was the editor.

Fatal Attraction (1987 Adrian Lyne)

A film that bears the awful distinction of having its ending changed as a result of a preview screening. Alex (Glenn Close) originally killed herself but following audience reaction the ending was changed to the wife (Anne Archer) finishing her off with a handily found gun.

To be honest, the original ending sounded a bit crap. The husband (Michael Douglas) is charged with murder but then the wife finds the tape the psycho has made in which she threatens suicide so the wife can clear her husband. Yawn. Also any cheating husband would have gotten rid of that tape immediately - incriminating evidence.

I mean, it's bad enough having a husband cheat on you but to then attract the disturbed psycho you'd find hard to forgive.

It plays about as well as it ever did. I blame writer James Dearden. Though the scene where he comes to her apartment and attacks her and she fights back I thought worked rather well (though what the fuck was his motivation?)

'Oh, she's washing up', Q commented in one of the sex scenes. 

Photographed by Howard Atherton. Edited by Michael Kahn and Peter Berger.

Lyne made eighties films that you kinda don't want to revisit: Foxes, Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal, Jacob's Ladder, Lolita and Unfaithful.

Michael Douglas kept reminding me of Family Guy's Quagmire.

Also what the fuck is 'spaghetti sauce'?

One of the key words describing this film on Amazon is 'Cerebral'. I think not.

The Last Word (2017 Mark Pellington)

Could have been the seed for Hacks. An aging advertising genius hires a young journalist to research her life and write a decent obituary - at least, that's the way it starts. Shirley MacLaine ends up semi-adopting a small child (AnnJewel Lee DIxon) and becomes a DJ, whilst teaching budding Amanda Seyfried how to act. Sorry - not act. What am I talking about? How to, er, fulfil her potential or something. See? It's Hacks.

Shirley MacLaine - I was thinking while it was going on - is quite bonkers. In real life.

It was quite enjoyable even though you can't help watching it and thinking that there's a better film going on somewhere else that you're missing out on.

With Anne Heche, Thomas Sadoski, Philip Baker Hall, Tom Everett Scott, Todd Louiso, Millicent Martin.

Los Olvidados (1950 Luis Buñuel & co-scr)

Grim and powerful social realist drama set in Mexico City, lives of impoverished youths (and adults) particularly well caught, with the odd surreal moment.

Throwing egg into camera noticeable amongst other directorial  effects. Good music (Rodolfo Halffter and Gustavo Pittaluga) and photography (Gabriel Figueroa). Incredibly ironic ending - murdered boy thrown away into garbage - one of the most memorable of all film endings, in fact.

Estela Inda, Miguel Inclan, Alfonso Mejia, Roberto Cobo (almost an Adrien Brody type), Alma Delia Fuentes, Mario Ramirez (lost boy).

Wondered if it was the influence on Cidada de Deus?