The Jewel in the Crown – Paul Scott (1966)
The Jewel in the Crown (1966) I was forty or fifty pages into this book when it penetrated my little brain that it wasn’t going to be a straightforward novel about the last days of Imperialist Britain in India. Consequently, I laid it aside for a few days and then started it again from a different perspective. I’m glad that I did. Perspective is what Paul Scott’s 1966 novel The Jewel in the Crown is all about. We start off...
The Predator (2018)
…as bad as it gets: The Predator (2018) My dear old dad always told me not to mock the afflicted, so I’m not going to take up too much of your time in talking about fan-favourite Shane Black’s lazy and truly dreadful comedy-sequel to the great Schwarzenegger original. I mean, even that title of theirs shows how little he and so-scripter Fred Dekker could be bothered their asses. And the only reason that I’m...
The Nun (2018)
The Nun (2018) Although of course we didn’t call them that back in the day, a Cinematic Universe was what first got me interested in movies in the first place. After all, that’s what all those Universal classics of the 30s and 40s were, what with the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man and Count Dracula eventually meeting up with each other. Mind you, the less said about Universal’s attempts to recreate that magic...
Black 47 (2018)
‘…the Economics of Famine in the West of Ireland’: Black 47 (2018) I’ll be seeing that one in an Arts House cinema. Or so I thought, some months back, when I first heard of Black 47, which was being described as the first film ever made about the Irish Famine. Well, I got that one wrong, didn’t I? Instead, it has opened very big indeed; but I wonder if the quieter approach mightn’t have worked better, because I’ve...
Searching (2018)
One of the Best Films of the Year: Searching (2018) One of the many extraordinary things – and there are so many – about director Aneesh Chaganty’s unexpectedly superb Searching is that only a few decades ago this film would have been classed as hardcore science-fiction. And possibly not even particularly believable SF at that. Yet with everything here shown through the use of the internet, laptops, smartphones...
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