Pomona Rewind

  MARTY SUPREME Sometimes the casting of a movie can tell you a lot about the film and the people who made it - even the smallest of roles. That's certainly the case with 'Marty Supreme,' the second feature that Josh Safdie has directed without his brother Benny. Safdie's film has two bits of striking casting. The first is Canadian businessman,  'Shark Tank' contributor  and ardent Donald Trump supporter,  Kevin O'Leary . Playing a successful businessman, O'Leary's casting tells you Safdie's movie is particularly fascinated by the mindset of entrepreneurs. However perhaps a more significant piece of casting is in a fringe role. Abel Ferrara , the director of controversial thrillers like ' Driller Killer ,' ' Ms 45 ' and ' Bad Lieutenant ' plays an ageing gangster. We'll come back to the significance of his involvement in the film. Let's focus on the plot first. Loosely based on the life of the  flamboyant American ...

SLOW HORSES, S4 After  three adventures  where they have bested agents  inside  and  outside British intelligence , the team from Slough House face their biggest challenge yet in Series Four. 'Slow Horses' begins its fourth series in typically shocking fashion, with an explosion ripping through London as a suicide bomber drives into the Westacres Shopping Mall. The man responsible is Zachary Hart's Robert Winters, with a pre-recorded video published of him admitting the attack. As armed police break into his flat to find forensic evidence linking him to the bombing, a booby trap device lies in wait and detonates, killing three officers. With a new out of his depth boss at the head of MI5, James Callis' Claude Whelan, his deputy Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner feels the heat about why the intelligence services were caught off guard. Meanwhile Jack Lowden's Slough House operative River Cartwright confides in Rosalind Eleazar's colleague Louisa Guy that h...

SLOW HORSES, S3 We know the drill by now. Each season of 'Slow Horses' begins with a big, pulsating set piece. But this time around it's not occurring in Blighty but in Istanbul where Sope Dirisu's head of security at the UK Embassy Sean Donovan is spying on Katherine Waterston's MI5 agent Alison Dunn. She is suspected of trying to leak information that could be highly damaging to British intelligence. The only problem is Sean and Alison are also lovers and when she discovers he is spying on her a cat and mouse game around Istanbul ensues as he tries to intercept a stolen document she is going to pass on to a mystery man. Losing him during the chase at dusk, Sean eventually catches up with where she is at an empty football stadium, only to discover Alison has been thrown off the building. A year later, Sean resurfaces in London at an AA meeting that Saskia Reeves' Slough House office administrator Catherine Standish attends regularly. Posing as an alcoholic name...

SLOW HORSES, S2 Having avoided shouldering the blame for a false flag operation that went badly wrong in the show's inaugural season, Apple TV's 'Slow Horses' are back for more adventures. However this time it isn't the far right the gang of MI5 screw ups in Slough House have to worry about. Season Two finds Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb and his gang of MI5 rejects encountering dodgy Russians after the suspicious death of a former disgraced comrade, Phil Davis' Richard Bough. The victim dies while following a man who is acting suspiciously outside his shop. In fact, the incident is of sufficient concern to Lamb that he combs video footage of Bough's last movements and even searches the bus he made his final journey in. There Lamb finds Bough's mobile with a message 'Cicada' on it, prompting him to get Jack Lowden's River Cartwright and the rest of the team to dig deeper. Independent of Lamb's operation, two of the team Dustin Demri-Burns...

  SLOW HORSES, S1 If you were a BBC, ITV or Channel 4 drama commissioner, you're probably cursing your luck. Long before Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ came on the scene, you would had the pick of the crop when commissioning television scripts. Great writers like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, Jimmy McGovern, Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and Alan Plater all made their name on terrestrial television and delivered stunning work. Huge audiences tuned in for adaptations of Robert Graves' 'I Claudius,' Anthony Trollope's 'The Barchester Chronicles' or John Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. However the shift in the British television landscape brought about by streaming has changed all that. Nowhere is that better illustrated than with a show like 'Slow Horses' winding up on Apple TV+. An adaptation of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' novels, Will Smith's spy series has all the ...

If you were to ask people to name a Diane Keaton role, two probably come to mind. The first would undoubtedly be the eponymous character in Woody Allen's romcom 'Annie Hall' - a role that won her a Best Actress Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. The second would be Kay, Michael Corleone's WASP wife who becomes increasingly repulsed by his ruthlessness in Francis Coppola's 'The Godfather' trilogy. There were many other acclaimed dramatic roles in movies like Warren Beatty's 'Reds,' Alan Parker's 'Shoot The Moon' and Jerry Zaks' 'Marvin's Room'. But she also enjoyed huge success in comedies over her career like Charles Shyer's 'Baby Boom,' his 'The Father of the Bride' movies, Hugh Wilson's 'First Wives Club' and Nancy Meyers' 'Something's Gotta Give' and her collaborations with Allen on seven other feature length movies. The predominant image of Keaton, though, is as the s...