Pomona Rewind

It's been hard for TV and film executives to resist dramas about the opioid crisis. According to  the Lancet last year , over 600,000 people died over two decades in the US and Canada as a result of addiction to the pills used to treat pain. The same article noted in England, while opioid prescriptions rose by 34% between 1998 and 2016, opioid related hospitalisations also increased by 48% between 2008 and 2018 at a cost of £137 million to the healthcare system. In late 2021 Hulu and Disney+ responded to the scandal by making  Danny Strong's miniseries 'Dopesick'  which focused on Purdue Pharma's aggressive marketing of the highly addictive Oxycontin. © Netflix Starring Michael Keaton, Peter Sarsgaard, Rosario Dawson, Will Poulter, Michael Stuhlbarg and Kaitlyn Dever, the eight part miniseries set a very high bar for any other film or television series about the scandal to clear. Nevertheless Netflix has weighed in with not just one but two projects. The most recent

From the mind of writer director Rebecca Miller comes a story about a composer, a psychiatrist and a tugboat captain. 'She Came To Me' is one of those American indie romcoms that pop up from time to time - seemingly gentle but with a little bit more grit than you might expect. It's one of those indie films that wonderfully thumbs its nose at convention. Peter Dinklage plays Steven Lauddem, a celebrated opera composer based in Brooklyn who is going through writer's block. © Vertical Entertainment & Sky Cinema This plunges him into deep depression as he desperately tries to catch sounds from everyday life that might inspire him to pen something great. Steven is married to Anne Hathaway's Patricia Jessop-Lauddem, a successful psychiatrist who has a needy patient, Chris Gerhard's Carl who is developing a fixation with her, imagining her naked. Patricia has her own hang ups. She suffers from OCD and likes nothing better than to clean the house, even though the La

Looking for an underdog to cheer on at next year's Oscars? Celine Song's 'Past Lives' may well be that film. A gentle movie about unrequited love across continents, the Korean Canadian's debut feature should melt even the hardest of hearts. It also contains some of the finest, understated acting on a cinema screen this year. © A24 & StudioCanal Written and directed by Song, the movie initially concerns itself with the childhood bond between Seung Ah Moon's Nora and Seung Min Yim's Hae Sung in Seoul in the year 2000. Thick as thieves, the 12 year olds enjoy each other's company in school and walk home together. Nora's mum, played by Ji Hye Yoon, and Have Sung's mum, played by Min Young Ahn, arrange for the two of them to go on a date. However as the kids goof around in a public park, Nora's mum reveals to her counterpart that her family is due to immigrate to Canada because her dad, played by Choi Won-young, has found work there as a direc

Five Conservative Prime Ministers in six years - sometimes you have to pinch yourself at the direction British politics has taken. From the  Brexit referendum result  to the  Daily Star testing whether a lettuce could outlast Liz Truss  in Downing Street, we have witnessed Westminster go through some very weird, turbulent years. Against the backdrop of all that turbulence, the BBC has asked its former Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg to make sense of it all in a three part documentary. 'Laura Kuenssberg's State of Chaos' is the latest in a line of Westminster documentaries on BBC2 that rely on interviews with politicians, special advisers and civil servants on the inside. © BBC In recent years, we've had ' Thatcher: A Very British Revolution'  and ' Blair and Brown: A New Labour Revolution '. So it's natural that against those two very impressive accounts of the Thatcher and Blair/Brown years, Kuenssberg's docu-miniseries will be measured.  The

Ever since his first film ' Henry V ' snapped up three Oscar nominations in 1990 including two for him, Kenneth Branagh has been able to do pretty much whatever he likes as a director. His movie adaptations of Shakespeare have attracted very starry casts. The Belfast born actor has also dabbled in big budget blockbuster franchises like Marvel's ' Thor ' and Paramount's ' Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit '. Disney even turned to him to helm its live action version of ' Cinderella '. © 20th Century Studios Not everything he had made has been gold - ' Peter's Friends ' or ' Artemis Fowl ,' anyone? However his underrated adaptation of ' Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ,' his sumptuous version of ' Hamlet ' and his semi-autobiographical ' Belfast ' would all look great on any director's CV. In recent years, Branagh has turned his attention to making big screen adaptations of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot