Pomona Rewind

  BLUE MOON It's about time Ethan Hawke landed an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Twice nominated before in the supporting actor category, over the years he has delivered superb lead performances for directors like Ben Stiller, Sidney Lumet and Paul Schrader. However it's his lead work with Richard Linklater that has really stood out - most notably in the 'Before' trilogy with Julie Delpy. Hawke's first nomination in the category has finally come about working with Linklater on 'Blue Moon' - a biographical comedy drama about the American musical lyricist Lorenz Hart. It's a superb performance of not so quiet desperation, with Linklater setting the mould for Hawke at the start of the film with a quote from Mabel Mercer that Hart was "the saddest man I knew". We hear a radio newscaster also announcing Hart's death from pneumonia as we watch him slump in a drunken stupor in a New York alleyway during a torrential rainstorm. Going back seven ...

   It says an awful lot about an actor's contribution to a franchise that when he no longer appears in its movies, it leaves a gaping hole. But that is exactly what happened when Robert Duvall did not reprise the role of consigliere, Tom Hagen in Francis Coppola's 'The Godfather, Part III' in 1990. The reason he did not reappear was down to his salary - he was offered four times less than Al Pacino's. And while he was not looking for pay parity with Pacino but something recognising his importance to the story, Hagen was instead written out of the saga and was replaced by George Hamilton's character BJ Harrison. Audiences and critics agreed that was a mistake. Even when Coppola recut the film with the 2020 director's cut 'Godfather Part III: Coda - The Death of Michael Corleone,' while it attracted more favourable reviews than the original, Duvall's absence continued to haunt it. In a largely favourable review of the new version, Chicago Sun Times...

  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...