Pomona Rewind

From childhood, Sally Kellerman always wanted to be an actress. Born into a Christian Scientist family in Long Beach California, she was initially shy but found her calling in her teenage years and eventually became one of America's most gifted comic actresses. Sally's mother was a piano teacher and her father was a Shell Oil executive who moved to the San Fernando Valley when she was in fifth grade. Kellerman told the Chicago Sun Times film critic  Roger Ebert in an interview in 1980  that she was a bit of a rebel in  Hollywood High School.  "It was the era of bobby socks and ponytails, high heels and makeup," she recalled.  "I was a bad girl. That meant I smoked, knew how to swear and sometimes I drank a beer.  "I was so dumb I had to be taught to swear. They called me Miss Innocent. I didn't smoke grass until I was 27." Academically she struggled but she got a taste of acting in a school production of 'Meet Me In St Louis'. Deemed to have

If you think your family's dysfunctional, you clearly haven't seen 'Smother'. Season one of RTE and Alibi's six part Irish thriller gives us the Aherns - a well to do Co Clare family who are more dodgy than a bargain du jour from Del Boy. Kate O'Riordan's characters are so corrupt and conniving, you're convinced you might need a solicitor for spending an hour in their company after each episode. At the heart of O'Riordain and director Daithi Keane's thriller lies a murder mystery. At the beginning of their tale, Stuart Graham's property developer Dennis Ahern stands on the edge of a cliff late at night. A car pulls up with its headlights beaming, forcing Dennis to screw up his face. There's a scuffle and then Dennis plunges to his death on the rocks below. We then go back in time to speculate why Dennis was murdered. O'Riordain and Keane take us to a family party for Dennis' wife, Dervla Kirwan's Val. The party in their plush

  It's fair to say that the film and television industry has become a bit too obsessed with franchises. Few could quibble with 'Star Trek,' ' Star Wars ,' ' Jurassic Park ' or  Marvel  earning the right to their sequels and reboots. However on the evidence of some recent attempts, the franchise obsession of some studios is bordering on the ridiculous. With no track record to speak of, the  'Fear Street'  slasher trilogy suddenly landed on Netflix last summer with a very dull thud. With 'The Mummy,' 'Van Helsing' and 'Godzilla versus Kong,' Universal's "Monsterverse" has plodded along with grandiose production values but terrible plots. And now, Matthew Vaughn's overrated secret agent romp 'The Kingsman' has spawned two films that audiences didn't really need. The original 'Kingsman' with Taron Edgerton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Mark Hamill and Samuel L Jackson in 2015 did phenomenal busin

  During the making of  'Ghostbusters: Afterlife,'  Ivan Reitman sat beside his son Jason on set while he directed it. Some filmmakers would find that off putting - especially if they were rebooting material created by their parents. Jason Reitman, however, enjoyed such a close relationship with his dad, he wasn't fazed. "You got to remember, when growing up, I would sit next to my dad (on set), so there was something already pretty natural and familiar about us sitting next to one another at the monitor," he told  the journalist Hadley Freeman in an interview in the Guardian last November. "And this was lovely because I had the world's foremost 'Ghostbusters' expert sitting next to me and the person I trust most on Earth  "No kid wants to take notes from their parents in general but never does a director have someone they trust as much as I trust my dad, somebody's who just looking out for them - and that made me feel incredibly safe.&qu