Jezza's Blog

  A biopic of Marie Curie that I quite liked, though the reviews are all terrible. Nice to Rosamund Pike playing against type as an older wo...

One of those films in which a whole village conspires to deceive an outsider (it reminded me of The Grand Seduction ) - in this case the man...

  Another Almodovar film (part of the Jane Opher program), and another good one - he's obviously hit his stride by now. This one has eve...

  Oh my...an unusual, amazingly different sort of book...one of the weirdest and most 'modern' that I've ever read. It's des...

As with Frozen, I think I'm not the target market for this Disney film, but I wanted to catch up on it. There was lots to like. The visu...

I just loved reading this book. I was led to it by the BBC TV series, which I enjoyed - but the book is so much better. The TV series was qu...

Cheerful and enjoyable but not very consequential film, in which Emma Thompson (looking gorgeous with great clothes and hair) plays a host...

I read the book a long time ago - 2011 - and remember it more fondly than my review (which only gave it two stars) suggests. It's sor...

A film set in a trading house at the very beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, with the implication that this institution and its Mortg...

A nice coming-of-age drama-comedy about two young people, at school in rural Ireland in the mid-1990s, both gay, who agree to pretend to h...

Another Hollywood film, billed as a 'comedy-drama' but with no actual laughs - look at that poster and tell me this is supposed to...

Great to see that Hollywood can sometimes turn out a really good film - a mystery thriller without stupid supernatural elements or a spiri...

I picked this up almost by accident; I was stuck outside for a few hours with nothing to read, and miraculously one of the charity shops w...

When I was writing 'The Girl in the Red Cape' this quote, from Engels' fab book The Peasant War in Germany  kept coming back ...

I really enjoyed this book about the outbreak of WW1 from the perspective of a single, not-very-bright, Polish-Ruthenian man. It covers hi...

I'm not all that fond of graphic novels...though this is more of a collection than a single narrative, with different authors and arti...

I so loved this historical novel - the atmosphere, the writing style, the characters, and the plot. I became as involved with the characte...

Gentle, mildly humourous British film about a fifteen year old heavy metal fan unexpectedly spending the summer with his mum after his div...

I sort of grew up with the evil eye, or at least the idea of it. When we went on a long journey my mum would remind us – in a jokey way, o...

This is a beautiful little book...a collection of short descriptive pieces about the English countryside that I might never have read. It ...