Pomona Rewind

JANE AUSTEN'S PERIOD DRAMA In 1995, Scottish actor  Peter Capaldi shared the Oscar for the Best Live Action Short  with another competitor Peggy Rajski for his 23 minute comedy ' Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life '. With its tongue in cheek title, the film starring Richard E Grant and Ken Stott was an amusing tale about Kafka's struggle to write his daring 1915 novella ' Metamorphosis '. Its tie with Rajski's ' Trevor ' showed an eye catching title could go a long way with Oscar voters who 12 years later awarded a statuette to Ari Sandel's musical comedy 'West Bank Story' about the rivalry between Palestinian and Israeli falafel restaurants. Now Julia Aks and Steve Pinder are hoping to do the same with their mischievously titled 'Jane Austen's Period Drama'. A spoof of ' Pride and Prejudice ,' ' Sense and Sensibility ' and other English costume dramas, it stars Aks as the heroine, Miss Estrogenia Talb...

WEAPONS What would it be like if Paul Thomas Anderson made a horror movie? It's an intriguing notion that sits in the back of your head while watching Zach Cregger's supernatural mystery horror 'Weapons'. Cregger's film may not be an Anderson movie but it's got a multi layered narrative that tells its horror story from several perspectives. The central premise is what happens to a community when all but one child in a third grade class disappear overnight? The class in question is taught by Julia Garner's Justine Gandy in the Pennsylvanian town of Maybrook. With no obvious explanation for the childrens' disappearance, wild conspiracy theories abound.  Josh Brolin's angry parent Archer Graff leads unproven accusations that Justine must have had a central role. As the town starts to look at Justine for some kind of explanation, uncomfortable truths start to surface about her past and her messy personal life. This impacts Alden Ehrenreich's married ...

  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...