Review of The Kingdom

Gripping Corsica-set crime drama, where a young woman finds herself suddenly in the criminal gang milieu that her mainly absent gang-leader father inhabits. Quite atmospheric, but also quite violent.

Watched on BFI.

Review of Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas)

Not one of Almodovar's best, though still a feast for the eye. A youngish woman, Elsa, has given up proper film-making for commercials, but she is writing the script for a film, drawing on the lives of people she is close to for the narrative. As the film progresses these people - notably her young friend Natalia, who has lost a child - find out that they are in her script and become angry. 

But it turns out that Elsa herself is a character in a film script, being written by an ageing director clearly based on Almodovar himself, who is also basing his narrative and characters from people he actually knows - and they don't like it either. As the film-within-the-film, and the film itself, come to an end there are several abrupt and unsatisfactory endings.

Watched at Jane's house - I think she streamed it from Amazon Prime.

Review of Wicker

Enjoyable but not very significant fairy tale film, in which an isolated fisher woman living on the edge of a ramshackle quasi-medieval village wishes for, and gets, a husband made of willow wickerwork by the town's slightly magical basket-maker. He's an ideal husband and lover, and everyone else in town becomes jealous.

She's a not very attractive middle-aged woman, played by Olivia Colman, not looking her sexiest. Lots of other celebrity actors. 

We watched this at the Vue Cinema in Stroud, not knowing until later in the evening that the author of the fairy tale, which is not a traditional one, is Stroud-based writer Ursula Wills. Looking forward to reading some of her short stories!

Review of "Woman At War"

Just your regular Icelandic-Ukrainian comedy-drama about an eco-warrior choir mistress who seeks to disrupt industrial sites in Iceland to protect nature - so she conducts a one-woman struggle against the electricity distribution system, in particular bringing down power lines. For a choir mistress she's very good at this - she starts by shorting out the lines by shooting a metal rope across the cables, but soon she's stealing Semtex and blowing up pylons. 

Both sisters are attractive middle-aged women. If this was a British film they'd be played by Olivia Colman.

There's a few nice touches - she has a much less engaged twin sister who is a yoga teacher and is only interested in change from within, and she's adopting a young child from Ukraine, and there's a three-piece band (delightfully known as ADHD) playing the soundtrack to the film who keep appearing in shot.

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

Pleasant, slightly boring (but in a nice read-last-thing-at-night) sort of way, I can't help wondering if this book was really necessary. It's a popularisation of Shakespeare scholarship - what order were the plays written in, what do we really know about his life (very little), and some gentle fun at the expense of Shakespeare-didn't-really-write-them conspiraloons. But did we really need it? Probably not.

Review of Vermiglio

If I don't write the review straight away it never happens.

This was a sad, slightly bleak film about a village in Northern Italy where the men have gone away to the war, and a man from the South (I think a deserter but I'm not sure any more) comes to the village with another man that he has fought alongside, gets a girl pregnant, marries her, then goes back to his home village in the South, where he already has a wife. The first wife shoots him dead when she finds out has happened.

The poster really doesn't convey the content or the tone of the film.

I was left with the thought that this sort of thing - desertion, bigamous marriages, and so on - must have been much more common in the days when bureaucratic systems were less joined up. Is that right?

Watched at Lansdown Film Club.

Review of "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" by Aaron Bastani

I've been reading a series of books about utopias, including William Morris's News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward...maybe even Red Plenty counts as a sort of account of a socialist utopia, albeit one that goes wrong within the scope of the book. 

So I thought I'd better read this too, as a positive vision of a technology-based socialist society, where abundance liberates everyone from scarcity and drudgery. One of those books that I'd heard about for so long that I had sort of forgotten that I hadn't actually read. 

Well, now I have, and it's a bit underwhelming. The boosterish sections on how amazing technologies are just coming down the pike didn't seem to be very critical, or to have much engagement with how these technologies might affect class relations or the workplace. Sometimes it reminded me of the stuff that I had to sit through from telecoms companies, or of the world visions of capitalist think tanks like the World Economic Forum.

Still, it did remind that I'd previously read and reviewed other things that touch on this, like ‘Inventing the Future’ by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek and even Paul Mason's "PostCapitalism" - it seems hard to recall that Mason once seemed like a quite important socialist intellectual, after his infatuation with Keir Starmer.

Review of The Oslo Trilogy - Love, Sex, and Dreams

Three loosely interlinked films, set in Oslo, and about love, sex and relationships - including how important sex and relationships are to each other. They are all set in Oslo, and glimpses of locations and settings from one film crops up in another. Oslo sometimes looks beautiful, and sometimes a bit bleak and soulless. From the films it seems like the people of Oslo are pretty busy having all kinds of different sex with each other; in one film a guy who is a happily married chimney sweep has sex with a male customer on a whim, and the rest of the film is about whether he and his wife can come to terms with this. 

In another a gay nurse has casual sex with people he meets on the harbour ferry, but the sex is just a way that he can find companionship and intimacy with others; he introduces a woman doctor colleague to the scene, and soon she's meeting people on the ferry too. There is absolutely nothing salacious, or prurient, or arousing, in the way that this is presented - it's just an exploration of how this kind of sex can or can't fit into other kinds of relationship.

The films are all slow and take a while to get going, but they are worth the trouble.

Watched on BFI Player.

Review of Primavera

Beautiful period drama about the young girls orphanage in Venice where Vivaldi spent most of his working life - I had no idea about his story at all, including the fact that he died in poverty and was unknown for 200 years until his work was rediscovered. Lots of unfamiliar stuff here about how Venice treated orphans, including grooming them into talent as musicians and then selling them off to nobles after which they were forbidden to play music any more.

Watched on BFI Player.

Review of Blue Heron

Clever, painful film about a troubled family - Hungarians, but living in British Columbia (Canada), and the parents lives dominated by their inability to do the right thing for their very-troubled teenage son. There's a clever narrative structure which makes the film as much about the unreliability of memory and the burden of unprocessed trauma, but it's hard to say much more without spoiling.

It's very good, well worth watching.

We watched via informal distribution.

Review of Erupcja

We watched this because the film critic of the New Yorker recommended it as one of the three best films of 2026 so far. It wasn't even a bit good. Maybe he gets bored of seeing good films and enjoys the odd bad one. This was dull, uninteresting to look at, badly acted...a young British couple are in Warsaw where the bloke is going to propose to the woman, but she's not keen and runs off to spend the time with her former girlfriend in the city, leaving the bloke lost and confused. Too hard to care about any of them or to take any interest in how it ends.