Jezza's Blog

A fun, enjoyable piece of C18th chick-lit, with lots of nicely observed bitchiness; I'm not sure why this isn't part of the regular ...

A bit of a meringue of a film - too sweet and light, not quite sour and sharp enough for the content. It's a movie treatment of a Jane...

A well-written and gripping account of a little-known incident in WW2, this book also raises interesting questions about the nature of hi...

I picked this up because I rather like the odd economist-anthropologist Thorsten Veblen; I’d used terms like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ...

Much lighter than the recent French film ‘ Marguerite ’, which was a more fictionalised version of the same story but dwelled more on the...

Disappointing Irish teen band film – so transparently a wish-fulfilment fantasy that it didn’t really hold my attention. Nice premise – p...

A beautiful, sad film about five young girls growing up in a rural community in North Eastern Turkey. Though the reviews seem to present ...

Somehow I've never got round to seeing this, so I was grateful for the chance to watch it in the Middle Floor at Springhill. It'...

I didn’t know anything about this – just found it on BBC iPlayer while looking for something to do, but it was really rath...

Not a terrible film, but not a great one either, and Miles deserves better. This is not a full musician biopic, so it misse...

This is one of the good Roth books (I really hate some of them) – well written, and with several important subjects addressed; McCarthyis...

Hard to know how to review this. It's much too long, for a start. Jordan Belfort is too disgusting a person with whom to spend three h...

My kids were grown up by the time this came out, and they are possibly of the wrong gender too, so I never got to see this. This weekend w...

Unbelievably, Netflix gave this 4.5 stars. Execrable dialogue, lame and predictable plot, squeaky-clean burlesque club where the healthy a...

Watched at a cinema in Bath, on a rainy Easter Saturday, partly to get out of the rain. This is a rather long but very good period drama...

A brilliant dark comedy drama centred on a policeman in rural Ireland caught up in a flawed operation to intercept a major drug shipment t...

I'm sorry I didn't like this more, because I recognise that it's a bit like my own book - alternative history, a lot of humour...

A very well-written, cleverly structured, thoughtful historical novel. Lots of insight into character, but also into big issues like the ...

A comic novel of sorts, with a rather nasty after-taste. It's well written, because McEwan  is a brilliant writer, and he has engaged ...

This is a well-written historical novel with a focus on the military aspects of the Albigensian Crusade. Although the political issues and ...