Jezza's Blog

Musical bio-pic about the life of P T Barnum, that comes nowhere near describing the actual complexity of Barnum's life - as a someti...

Technically it's amazing, but the content and the message are a bit unsettling. I'm used to the story about WW1 that it was a poin...

Zionism and the Holocaust One of the elements in the row over Ken Livingstone’s suspension from the Labour Party was the su...

A fairly dull Israeli film about an Orthodox woman who has waited eleven years to get married but has never found anyone who wants to marr...

A Norwegian film that's basically about social class, as viewed through the prism of youth culture and dancing. Amalie comes from a we...

Watched this, though not quite from the beginning, on Netflix. It struck me as rather close to the spirit of the Kipling book than the Dis...

Unusually a film that I'd say is better than the book, though that wasn't bad. About an Orthodox Jewish community where the death ...

Surprisingly interesting film - a romcom I suppose, but elements of proper drama and grief/mourning. Lots of stuff about how cold it is in...

Some good visual jokes for the knowing - especially in the Bronze Age city. I particularly liked the names of the stalls in the market pla...

Another really sad film, this time about people who are comparatively rich and successful, but still confronted by emptiness and failed re...

A very good, sad and somewhat harrowing film about a young man - he's fifteen and should be at school, though he's not - living in...

Sort of biopic of cartoonist John Callahan, who was an alcoholic and paraplegic as a result of a drunk-driving accident. A narrative struc...

Very dark thriller - dark in both senses of the word, because much of what happens on the screen is really murky. It has a complex plot - ...

Quite good war-time spy/double agent thriller, with Brad Pitt in the lead as a Canadian special ops guy who falls for his associate and th...

This was something of a disappointment. I'd been really looking forward to it since seeking Réka Tenki in On Body and Soul , where she...

Another nicely-written, well-structured book from Barbara Kingsolver, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It's great that she not only creates...

A film about a New York writer (inevitably, he's Jewish) who is feted as a great, and wins the Nobel Prize for literature, but really ...

The official theatrical release poster Another not-so-great film on Netflix. Young Jewish guy in 1950s America goes from New York to a c...

Just read this, having read lots of her later work. This reads very much like a first novel - it's not terrible, but it's not as g...

A film about people with learning disabilities in a very bleak-looking Galway City, Ireland. A group of people with learning disabilities ...