Jezza's Blog

A film from 2000 about a 15-year-old boy (young man?) who blags his way into writing for Rolling Stone magazine (they don't know how old...

I read 'The Way Home', Mark Boyle's book about living without technology, and found it just about interesting enough to want to ...

A moving, effective film about deafness - a heavy metal drummer becomes profoundly deaf, and he has to reflect on how he's going to live...

Mixed feelings about this. Sometimes I can't help being engaged by his honesty, and by the single-mindedness with which he really does r...

This was an unexpectedly moving film - what made it special was seeing the Scottish engineering workers who had 'blacked' (well, we ...

I started this book with zero expectation - I hadn't heard ot the writer, or anything about the book. I've really enjoyed it - thoug...

A strange, understated film about...well, what, exactly? A pawnshop in a town in the Southern USA, to which two women - lovers, though that...

  A really silly comedy that turned out to be quite enjoyable. Seth Rogan (and that's generally a bad sign) is an investigative journali...

Kim Stanley Robinson is not a great writer, and this book is not great literature. Nevertheless, I'm still thinking about several days a...

 A film about fracking, and the way that gas companies turn up in small towns and bribe/beat them into selling the mineral rights. There wer...

A beautiful, haunting film without much of a plot or development. It's about a young man who has been a rising star in the local rodeo s...

Danish thriller about a high-profile headhunter brought in to find a replacement CEO for a family business who finds himself caught up in in...

I've had this on my shelf since forever and never quite got round to reading it...until the pandemic and lockdown. I expected something ...

Sweet teen movie about a young ballet dancer who comes from a famous ballet family, and is about to have the chance to audition for the New ...

Sad, painful, beautiful film about Nepalese children from remote villages who are sent to school in the capital, where they are educated for...

Based on the J M Coetzee novel of the same name, and no relation at all to the Cavafy poem which I was actually looking for when I came ac...

A pretty terrifying drama in which we see a bright young woman with a series of debilitating diseases being looked after by her kind and car...

This is a film about a Black young man in Detroit who's in trouble - with teachers, with the law, and so on - so his mother despairs of ...

Another near-perfect book by Helen Dunmore. Set in Finland in the early C20th, and capturing expertly the tension between Finns, Swedish-Fin...

Perhaps unsurprisingly I didn't much like this. I think it harnessed the sympathy and warmth that people feel towards community choirs a...