Pomona Rewind

  The dramatic life and death of Princess Diana seems tailor made for novels, plays and films. Many writers have responded to the challenge - although a lot of preferred to dwell on the events surrounding her death. Those have included the publication of thrillers like Aaron McCallum Becker's 'Whose Death in the Tunnel?', Tom Cain's 'The Accident Man' and Eoin McNamee's '12:23 - Paris: 31st August 1997'. Other novelists have opted for afterlife tales like Elizabeth Dewbury's 'The Lovely Wife' and Emma Tennant and Hillary Bailey's 'Diana: The Ghost Biography'. Isabelle Rivere and Caroline Babert's 'Lady D' took a different tack, speculating on what her life might have been like had she been able to walk away from the accident in Paris unscathed. Onstage, David Bryan and Joe DiPietro tried to turn the Princess's life story into a musical 'Diana' which opened in San Diego in 2019 and then Broadway but most

  Disney has built its brand on telling fairytales of brave Princesses, wicked witches and wizards, misunderstood beasts and handsome princes. In doing that, it has scoured the world for inspiration and has used its animation to introduce audiences to different cultures. From the Middle East in 'Aladdin' to China in 'Mulan,' the French village of 'Beauty and the Beast' to the Polynesian islands of 'Moana,' Disney has developed exotic adventures about places a lot of their viewers will never visit. Their three flag bearers in this year's Best Animated Feature contest have stories set in various locations  - Colombia, Italy and South East Asia. With that desire to tell stories from across the globe, comes the risk of being accused of cultural appropriation - especially with American or British actors voicing characters from other countries and Western pop culture references peppering the script. It would be foolish, though, to over-analyse Disney's

At the end of the Oscar nominated documentary short 'Lead Me Home,' comes a sobering caption. It reads: "On any given night, over half a million Americans experience homelessness." That will shock some people. It might not shock others. But it's half a million people too many. The emotion that sentence should stir in all who read it is shame. In a country as prominent and proud as the United States, it should also be disturbing to read another caption at the start of the film which says in the past five years Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle have declared states of emergency around the scale of homelessness. Renting in all three cities has become unaffordable for big chunks of society and it isn't unique to the United States. Whether it is Canada, Australia, Argentina, Zimbabwe, India or France, the sight of people sleeping rough isn't uncommon and it isn't good enough. No-one should be forced to live on the streets. But Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk&#

One of the greatest critics of all time, Roger Ebert is often quoted for observing "the movies are like a machine that generates empathy". That in a nutshell is the best description of cinema's genius as an artform. Whether it is fictional or factual, film at its best can transport us into lives we have little or no experience of. Those experiences can range from an astronaut preparing to be launched into space, a writer struggling with cerebral palsy, a soldier in the heat of battle or a slum dweller trying to get by in a harsh world. It is cinema's ability to give us a flavour of how others live and feel for them as they experience ups and downs that is its most precious quality - especially when a film depicts life in another country. For Western audiences in particular, it is really valuable when a film gives us a glimpse of life in a country like Afghanistan that we know little about. For much of our lives, Afghanistan has been depicted on TV as a war torn nation

It's hard for anyone to match the sheer beauty of Joni Mitchell's original version of ' Both Sides Now ' - let alone top it. Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins, Clannad, Pete Seeger and Neil Diamond have all tried. However none of them have managed to come near Mitchell's simple but moving rendition. Towards the end of Sian Heder's Oscar contender 'CODA,' though, Emilia Jones' belts out a fantastic version of the song while signing its lyrics for the deaf. Like Mitchell's version, it's a modest arrangement with Jones initially accompanied on a piano and it's all the more affecting for it. 'CODA' stands for Children of Deaf Adults, with Jones' playing a talented young singer in a family where everyone else is deaf. The AppleTV+ film, which is based on a 2014 French film ' La Famille Belier ,' has suddenly gained momentum in this year's Oscars race, interrupting what was beginning to look like