Pomona Rewind

   Every now and again, a low budget film comes along with real charm and an ability to grab you by the heart. Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's 2006 comedy 'Little Miss Sunshine' is a great example of this. A road movie about a dysfunctional family in a dodgy Volkswagen van trying to get their daughter to a beauty pageant, it had a smart script, loads of laugh out loud moments, touching drama and a great cast. Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan's 'Saint Frances' is very much in that vein. Mixing wry humour with tender drama, it tackles a very heavy subject - the consequences of abortion - and turns it into an absorbing take about a 34 year old woman who has lost her way in life  O'Sullivan plays Bridget, a woman drifting through jobs after failing to make it as a poet despite showing promise on a creative writing course at university. A lapsed Catholic, she hooks up at the start of the film with a younger man, Max Lipchitz"s Jace. On the recommen

  If there has been one bright spark for cinema in 2020, it has been the greater exposure for indie films as audiences consumed movies on streaming services during a bumpy year for theatrical distribution. New directorial voices have been given an exposure that might otherwise have been ignored if they had been reduced to arthouse cinema runs. That has enabled a more diverse set of filmmakers and topics to come to the attention of audiences than would otherwise be the case. Some of the most interesting films of 2020 have come from women. Eliza Hittman's  'Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always'  was remarkable for the way it took a sensitive issue like teenage pregnancy and abortion and dealt with it in a non judgmental way. Similarly, Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan's 'Saint Frances' dealt with the consequences of abortion from the perspective of a 34 year old in an empathetic way. Chinonye Chukwu's ' Clemency ' tackled the death penalty with a sea

   For three seasons, Charlie and Daisy May Cooper's BBC3 sitcom 'This Country' has bucked comic convention. Audiences in Britain have been used to mostly urban sitcoms and have rarely got to see comedy about rural life. If they have, rural life has been depicted from a privileged background like BBC1's 'To  The Manor Born' or in clerical comedies like BBC1's Church of England sitcom 'The Vicar of Dibley' or the eccentric Irish Catholicism of Channel 4's 'Fr Ted'. But when 'This Country' first aired on BBC3 as a mockumentary in February 2017, viewers - particularly in the Cotswolds - were struck by its authenticity. Daisy May Cooper and her brother Charlie drew a lot of inspiration for the show from their own experience of rural poverty and boredom. A lot of its humour is drawn from the characters killing time but like a lot of great comedy, there is a vein of tragedy. And in the case of Daisy May Cooper's Kerry Mucklowe and h

   If someone told you Guy Ritchie had been hired to do a $20 million version of 'Minder,' you wouldn't be surprised. It'd probably star Hugh Grant as Arthur Daley and Leonardo DiCaprio as Terry and involve some dodgy cannabis deal they have unwittingly stumbled into that finds them on the wrong end of several crime gangs. There would be lots of slow mo and freeze frames, bloody gunfights and a liberal sprinkling of the c word (the really rude one) throughout. That, after all, is the Guy Ritchie formula and it is rather depressingly on display in spades in 'The Gentlemen'. Matthew McConaughey is the Hollywood star of choice in Ritchie's latest and he struts across the screen looking like a Carnaby Street clothes horse as Mickey Pearson. His character is an American cannabis baron who went to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, courted the establishment and built a drugs empire. But this being a Guy Ritchie movie, other people want a piece of the actio

It has been seriously tempting to write a one sentence review of 'Dolittle'. If I had done that, there is no doubt in my mind what the sentence would have been. How the f**k did this get made? However 'Dolittle' should be dissected. To begin on a positive note, Stephen Gaghan's film looks terrific. But all that glistens is a long way away from being gold in what is a terrible mess of a movie. A second cinematic reboot of Hugh Lofting's 1920 series of children's novels about a doctor with a gift of talking to animals, it follows in the footsteps of Richard Fleischer's beloved 1967 musical 'Dr Dolittle' with Rex Harrison. It also follows 'Dr Dolittle' - Betty Thomas's contemporary 1998 updating of the story with Eddie Murphy. That film was such a hit it inspired a 2001 sequel and three direct to video sequels about Dolittle's daughter in 2006, 2008 and 2009. Gaghan has chosen to go back to a period setting in the latest version, wit

   One of the better things to happen during lockdown has been how it has enabled people to catch up on all those series they meant to watch. In our household, it's been comedies like 'This Country, 'Motherland' and 'Schitt's Creek'. We've also caught up on 'The Marvelous Ms Maisel' and 'Succession,'. But one of the shows that we have really enjoyed is Channel 4's 'Friday Night Dinner'. While we came late to the party, Robert Popper's sitcom about the Friday night ritual of a suburban north London Jewish family rarely delivers a dud episode across it six series run. The set up is simple. Simon Bird's advertising jingle composer Adam Goodman and his estate agent brother, Tom Rosenthal's Johnny turn up for dinner every Friday night at their parents home. Their dad, Paul Ritter's Martin is eccentric, often wandering around the house naked from the waist up, occasionally washing his feet in the downstairs loo and d

Even before it hit cinemas, there were a couple of warning signs about Aoife Crehan's cross-border comedy, 'The Last Right'. First of all, it slipped in and out of cinemas in Ireland before getting a digital release. Secondly, when they did promote it, the film's main marketing draw appeared to be that it had a soundtrack by Snow Patrol's frontman Gary Lightbody. Finally, the film had Colm Meaney in the kind of buffoonish policeman role that he has tended to trot out in the last 16 years since he did it so well in John Crowley's 'Intermission'. 'The Last Right' indeed turns out to be everything you feared - full of Oirish twinkle, with a script that is about as funny as RTE's 1980s laughter free sitcom 'Leave It to Mrs O'Brien'. But the worst thing about Crehan's lazy film is its appalling waste of talent. Michiel Huisman plays Daniel Murphy, a Bostonian lawyer, flying home to his native west Cork at Christmas following the de

As American politicians, their advisers and the media treat everything in politics as a zero sum game, the more depressing it gets. The Trump Presidency has accelerated the race to the bottom in US politics, focusing solely on appeasing the base and treating Democrats, dissenting voices in the Republican Party and the media like their worst enemies. Trump and his allies have consistently shattered democratic norms and  shunned bipartisanship. Even now, some continue to stoke the flames of partisan politics by refusing to concede what everyone knows - that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In recent weeks, Trump toadies have grasped at frankly ridiculous allegations of voter fraud on an industrial scale and their arguments have consistently failed to stand up to scrutiny in the US courts. The posturing of Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others in has been corrosive for democracy. The unwillingness of the Republican Party leadership to be open and honest about the defeat has also been an emb