As Pride month begins, the Bush Theatre revives Waleed Akhtar’s 95-minute duologue, The P Word, a rom com of sorts with an asylum strand as two very different men of Pakistani descent almost reluctantly find love with one another. Using all of the tropes of the cinematic genre – which itself has inveigled its way […]
Following on from my previous movie summaries, this is my May 2026 review. Overall, I watched 31 new movies this month, taking the total for the year to 149! Watched 31 Hours 51 Average Rating 5.9 Highest Rated 8 The best movie of the month was The Drama (8/10), written and directed by Norwegian Kristoffer Borgli. He is the creator behind the wonderfully odd Dream Scenario, starring Nicolas Cage, and Sick of Myself, a comedic look at narcissism. The movie stars two much-in-demand actors –…
What can I say about the parade. Arsenal won the Premier League and the whole of North London turned red to celebrate it, more than a million of us crammed into the streets for the day. The Champions League final had been lost the night before, the heartache of it still fresh, and this fan base still turned up the next morning and made me proud all over again, the way it always seems to find a way of doing.I barely caught sight of the buses themselves, buried as I was under red flares and flags…
I only played Atmosfear once, at a friend’s house, and I liked it while but also felt like I had arrived a little late. I was old enough to issues with the game, but not so old that I could ignore what the game was trying to do. The Gatekeeper shouting from the television, the clock running, everyone getting a little louder as the tape kept going, it was a great setup. If I had played it at twelve, that would have been perfect. I would have been nervous, excited, and completely sold on…
Marie Queenie Lyons 1. Marie Queenie Lyons - See And Don't See.mp3 2. Marie Queenie Lyons - Daddy's House.mp3 3. Marie Queenie Lyons - You Used Me.mp3 4. Marie Queenie Lyons - Your Thing Ain't No Good Without My Thing.mp3 5. Marie Queenie Lyons - Snake In The Grass.mp3 6. Marie Queenie Lyons - Your Key Don't Fit It Anymore.mp3 7. Marie Queenie Lyons - Fever.mp3 8. Marie Queenie Lyons - I Don't Want Nobody To Have It But You.mp3 9. Marie Queenie Lyons - We'll Cry Together.mp3 10. Marie Queenie…
Ladies and gentlemen, here's exhibit AI
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, 1920 One hundred years ago this month, Mary Pickford sent Grace Kingsley a letter from Montecantini, Italy all about her travels with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks: You would be most happy to see the delightful reception we have met with all through Italy, Naples, Genoa, Florence and Rome, by the Fascisti, artists, and the social world. The demonstration at the station in Rome on our arrival was as enthusiastic as any we have ever had. I was again forced to…
We had a really wonderful day yesterday seeing four films at the 2026 UCLA Festival of Preservation.The festival was held at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where I have seen scores of films over the years. It began Friday evening, May 29th, running through Sunday night.We chose to attend most of the day Saturday due to both our schedules and our interest in the day's movies. Two of yesterday's films were new to us and two were repeat watches, combining for a…
Watched: The Mandalorian and Grogu 🍿I took my teenager to see this. It was good if considered an extended TV episode. I think Jeremy Allen White was a miscast; his voice didn’t work for me in the role of Rotta.
Marilyn. The very mention of her name conjures images of her playful, unmistakably flirtatious smile, her luminous blonde hair, her expressive eyes. Not to mention her distinctive singing voice and her flair for comedy. But as a resident in the shadowy world of film noir? Not so much. At least, that’s probably not what most folks associate with Monroe – but you can bet that I sure do! Monroe was born 100 years ago, on June 1, 1926, and I’m celebrating this event by spotlighting the four films…
True Stories (1986) Writer/director David Byrne is our guide to the fictional town of Virgil, Texas, where they’re about to hold their sesquicentennial celebration. He introduces us to an assortment of Virgil’s eccentric residents, including: Kay and Earl Culver (Annie McEnroe and Spalding Gray), a husband and wife who haven’t spoken to each other in years, a pathological liar (Jo Harvey Allen), Louis Fyne (John Goodman), a good-natured bachelor who just wants a wife, and a woman so lazy she…
FOLLOW ME QUIETLY (1949) is a movie I've enjoyed multiple times in the past, including on Turner Classic Movies in 2011 and via a Warner Archive DVD in 2014.It had been a number of years since I last saw the movie, so I was glad to revisit it this weekend on a brand-new Warner Archive Blu-ray.FOLLOW ME QUIETLY is a minor yet well-made, interesting film noir/crime film which runs a snappy hour flat.William Lundigan plays Detective Harry Grant, who is trying to find a serial killer known as "The…
Who won 24 in 24: Last Chef Standing season 3? Do I know? Do you know? Was it good? Was it great? Let's find out!
An ongoing series Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wikipedia as a Windows XP desktop. Shoutout to the Night Witches, (unfortunately) not an awesome band but an all-female Soviet bomber regiment who attacked the Nazis during World War II.
Altered States: the documentary. Lilly invented the isolation tank, did psychedelic drugs, got naked, and “regressed through generational time.” He survives experiments with dolphins, the US government, hollywood, LSD, and the isolation tanks, only to go insane on ketamine (“hourly injections of ketamine inspire increasingly apocalyptic visions”). Besides Altered States, works based on his studies include Ecco the Dolphin, Day of the Dolphin, Holy Mountain, and probably parts of the Hitchhikers…
I've seen the vast majority of Cary Grant's films, but thanks to Universal I've recently caught a couple of his very earliest films for the first time.I reviewed the entertaining comedy THIS IS THE NIGHT (1932) last month, and I've just finished watching GAMBLING SHIP (1933).GAMBLING SHIP is a quick little 72-minute film from Paramount Pictures which I found lots of pre-Code fun.Grant plays Ace Corbin, a Chicago mobster who decides he's tired of living dangerously and heads to California for a…
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of game theory’s all-time great puzzles. It goes like this: Two men are taken into custody for a crime. The cops have a little evidence, enough to put both men away for a few years, but if they had more to go on, the punishment could be a lot more severe. The two men in the holding cell know the cops won’t have much if they both keep quiet. All the crooks have to do is not turn on each other to both get off with a light sentence. However, the crooks also know the…
The story so far: Voyager launched with Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor as showrunners. Under their auspices, we saw the USS Voyager, its intrepid crew, and the rag-tag band of Maquis paramilitaries they were chasing swept to the Delta Quadrant. Forced to work together, the characters merged into a single Starfleet organisational structure, pulled their socks up, and began the long slog back to the Alpha Quadrant… which at first ended up involving way too many encounters with the Kazon.…
Camera: iPhone 17 pro max. Using Provoke app.
A Mexican customs officer befriends a Magonista general, Welsh mercenary Rhys Pryce, played by Rhys Pryce, and is threatened with death by the government for refusing to betray him. A slice of the Mexican Revolution. Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of EYE. One Good Turn While the star system was not established for another fifteen […]
What a treat it was to witness The Rapping Princess– a celebration of individuality and music, told with a huge dose of joy. The Rapping Princess is adapted from the book by award-winning author Hannah Lee, with illustrations by Allen Fatimaharan. Real care has been taken to honour the book from the rhythmic verse to the joyful details from Fatimaharan’s illustrations which are echoed in the production, particularly in the gorgeously vibrant set and costumes designed by Laura McEwen, which even…
"Tuning a piano is about creating harmony out of chaos, and to do that you've got to be comfortable with imperfection." A piano tuner (Leo Woodall) with sensitive hearing discovers he has a talent for safe cracking. He starts work for an Israeli crime syndicate to pay for his mentor’s (Dustin Hoffmann) medical bills. What starts as an amusing buddy comedy turns into a rom-com, then crime caper, then mutates into a full-blown quite harrowing thriller. It sounds tonally confused but somehow…
The Star Wars Universe has expanded massively yet despite the undoubted quality of the offshoots (notably the superb Andor) they are a fairly long way from the tone of the 1977 original. Here though is a branch of the tale that indulges in exactly the same fast paced action orientated type of story that lit the fuse. The Mandalorian and Groku hardly rests, pinwheeling from one place to another frantic to throw our unusual heroes into ever more perilous situations. What you gain from the action…
The opening title sequence for Spider-Noir, the new superhero series developed by Oren Uziel for MGM+ and Prime Video (and produced by SPTV) is slick, stylized and dark – a perfect match for the series starring Nicholas Cage, Brendan Gleeson and Li Jun Li. I had to double-check another cast member, Lukas Haas, and sure enough, the last memory I have of him is when he played the part of the Amish child who witnesses a murder in the 1985 Harrison Ford vehicle Witness. There are plenty of other…
Jīnchéng Theater (金城戲院) is located in Mailiao, a remote coastal township in northwestern Yunlin, Taiwan. It was reputedly built in either 1957 or 1965 and probably closed in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, a casualty of changing consumer habits and population outflow to larger urban centers. This hulking monster of a theater accommodated approximately 600 patrons in wooden seats at its peak, catering to the mostly agrarian population of this small town. The functional façade of Jincheng…
More Luigi Maggi! IL DIAVOLO ZOPPO/THE DEVIL ON TWO STICKS is a trick film fantasy, in which a worthless dude who’s trying to escape marriage to a woman he’s seduced, frees a demon from an alchemist’s bottle and is granted his heart’s desire. That’s it — no ironic reversal/trick/punishment, a Faustian pact without a downside. […]
Hathaway, Char’s Counterattack, and the Problem with Amuro Ray
This weekend, I’m back with some more optical media testing, as I’ve amassed a large collection just waiting for me to discover how well they work, or if they still work at all. This time, we’re looking at four different types – the Imation i-Pro 8x DVD-R, Mitsubishi 8x DVD-R, Verbatim 16x DVD+R and a generic bundle-in 16x DVD-R that came with an external slimline USB DVD writer. What’s the common thread that links them all together? Read along to find out. Imation i-Pro 8x DVD-R Imation would…
La Haine (1995)
