Pomona Rewind

It is regarded to this day as one of the high watermarks of Stanley Kubrick's career. 'The Shining' appeared in cinemas in 1980 -five years after the underwhelming critical and commercial response to his Irish period drama, 'Barry Lyndon'. An adaptation of a Stephen King novel set in Colorado, it is regarded as one of the most influential horror movies of all time. However its production was far from smooth. Kubrick had at various stages considered Robert de Niro, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford for the role of the troubled writer Jack Torrance but Jack Nicholson was his first choice. King was not so sure, however, believing Nicholson's Academy Award winning performance in Milos Forman's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' meant that audiences would be less shocked by his character's descent into madness. He had preferred a more conventional actor like Jon Voight, Michael Moriarty or Christopher Reeve in the role

It's an early Oscar front runner and it wowed the Toronto Film Festival. David O Russell's ' Silver Linings Playbook ' has hit our cinema screens and is  sharply dividing critics. The Observer's veteran film critic, Philip French was amused by it, while the  Daily Telegraph's Robbie Collin denounced it as corny, contrived and cheap. Danny Leigh railed against it on BBC1's Film 2012 while his co-host Claudia Wi nkelman gushed about it (but then again, she has a tendency to gush about m ost movies). Based on a novel by Matthew Quick, Bradley Cooper plays a damaged Philadelphia  high school history teacher, Pat Solitano who is bipolar. At the start of the film, he is discharged from the mental health institution  in Baltimore he has been consigned to by the courts after a vicious assault  on his wife's lover. It is clear from the off that Pat's mother, Dolores (Australian actress Jacki  Weaver) is taking a huge gamble by bringing him h

In 1973, English academic Laura Mulvey shook up conventional film criticism with her essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. In this seminal and controversial work, Mulvey drew on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to argue that classic Hollywood movies were almost entirely shot from a male perspective. Her essay claimed because of this, audiences were forced to adopt a "male gaze" which determined the way female characters were portrayed onscreen. While male characters tended to be active and drive the plots of films, she observed their female counterparts were largely reduced to secondary, supporting roles where they had little impact on the storyline and were there for the purposes of sexual objectification. Mulvey subdivided the male gaze into two camps - the fetishistic gaze (where movies tended to portray women characters as Madonnas) and the voyeuristic gaze (where women were depicted as whores). Laura Mulvey's male g

A couple of weeks ago George Clooney was a dad struggling to keep his family together as his wife neared death in 'The Descendants'. Now it's Matt Damon's turn to play a struggling, grieving dad. Clooney's movie ' The Descendants '  is typical of its director, Alexander Payne - whimsical, bitter, witty with a quirky soundtrack. Damon's movie ' We Bought A Zoo ' is typical too of its director Cameron Crowe - romantic, saccharine, with a hip soundtrack. Crowe, a former Rolling Stone journalist, is at his best when he is affectionately chronicling the world of rock bands - whether it is the Zepplin style band in ' Almost Famous ' or the Seattle grunge scene in 'Singles'. His biggest box office success, however, was ' Jerry Maguire ', with Tom Cruise playing a sports agent desperately trying to hold on to his prize client Cuba Gooding Jr's loud mouthed American football star while falling for Renee Zellwegg

There's a scene in Danny Boyle's ' Trainspotting ' where two of its anti-heroes, Renton and Sick Boy, debate the careers of pop stars, footballers and actors. Sick Boy opines that Sean Connery is following the same downward trajectory of those "who had it and then lost it". He mentions  Elvis Presley , George Best,  Lou Reed , David Niven,  Malcolm McLaren  and former Celtic striker Charlie Nicholas in the same breath. If Sick Boy were to compile a 2012 list, he may well include Woody Allen.  For much of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, Allen was the film connoisseur's comedian - churning out every year some of cinema's smartest and most critically acclaimed comedies. From the slapstick of 'Bananas' and 'Sleeper' to the sophisticated wit of 'Annie Hall' and 'Hannah and Her Sisters' to the nostalgic humour of ' The Purple Rose of Cairo ' and 'Radio Days', his movies always guaranteed a high laug