Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky is a great movie. Simple, poignant, and beautiful. All things I like. So why didn’t it - quite - work?

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If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!This is a controversial one. It’s a pragmatic piece of advice, that doesn’t feel very pure to me because it’s based on my personal taste rather than any rules of drama (if there are such things) - and it [...]

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I’d hoped to bring you two warm recommendations of two movies you had to go and see at all costs. Both from this side of the Atlantic. Both getting great reviews, from all the British national newspapers right through to Rottentomatoes.com
Sadly…
Control is the story of a little ol’ Manchester band called Joy Division. They [...]

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I saw the Harry Potter movie last night, and, as usual with a Harry Potter movie, I came away puzzled. It looked great, it was intriguingly dark in places, it made all the right moves, yet, once again by half way through I was looking at my watch and wondering why the cinema seats were [...]

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Apparently peacefully, at home, at the age of 89.
From the last interview I saw with him he was happy and calm, and ready for his life and his work to end, so that’s not so bad. 
Obviously I’m sad - I don’t have any heroes any more, but he was up there in the next rank, [...]

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Announcing my Campaign for Real Movies. By which I mean movies for adults. No, not dodgy films with nude people, but movies made for a grown up sensibility. The amount of press Sideways got for being in any way concerned with real emotional issues was staggering. If you didn’t know any better you might think [...]

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Oh curses. I finished series 3.
I’m left with the sense of an epic sweep. And real loss.
“We are bored with good and evil. We renounce the theme.”
David Simon (apparently) said this. And if he really did, he’s even more the man.
Here’s some more paraphrases from the commentary on the last ep, which I actually did [...]

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In the way we do now I now usually watch tv in whole series size bites, courtesy of Amazon and the boxed DVD set. This last few weeks it has been The Wire.
I’ve been a fan of David Simon since I first saw Pembleton’s stroke in that episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. I [...]

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I’m late to comment, I know, but I just saw the Sopranos last episode, and I had no idea what was going to happen. All I’ll say is my jaw dropped. Can’t remember seeing THAT before…! Nice one Mr Chase.

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I saw this by accident, with a friend who’d just had some terrible news about a TV movie she is producing (change of regime high up in the network means all the projects on the development slate, even the ones with a theoretical green light, get canned, or run into unfeasible demands.  Typical. But not good, seeing [...]

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