Pomona Rewind

In 1994, some bright spark in Paramount Pictures had the idea of bringing the original ' Star Trek ' cast together with the cast of the TV spin-off ' Star Trek : The Next Generation'. David Carson's ' Star Trek : Generations' brought William Shatner's Captain Kirk together with Patrick Stewart's Captain Jean Luc Picard in what represented the handing over the cinematic baton to the newer franchise. Much to Paramount's delight, it made a very handsome profit - scooping almost four times its $35 million budget at the box office. Stewart's other signature role has been, of course, as the wheelchair confined Charles Xavier/Professor X in the 'X Men' movies - appearing in five of 20th Century Fox films based on Marvel Comics' series about a band of mutant superheroes. However unlike ' Star Trek ', the cinematic baton has already been passed on to a new generation of actors. James McAvoy became Charles ...

“Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America,” the attorney and environmental campaigner Robert F Kennedy Jr observed. “We don’t really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.” Alex Gibney has been one of the most effective flag wavers for investigative reporting in the US in recent years. The New Yorker, who in 2007 captured the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ about the beating to death fof a taxi driver in Afghanistan by US soldiers, has carved out a reputation as a fearless documentary filmmaker. He has tackled subjects as varied as Enron, the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, Scientology and the doping scandal in cycling epitomised by Lance Armstrong. In recent years, he has also collaborated with the Belfast-based journalist Trevor Birney and his colleagues at Below the Radar and Fine Point Films. Birney and his team co-produced G...

Last Sunday, I fully intended to go to see 'Lincoln' or ' Les Miserables '. But such is the popularity of those Oscar nominated movies right now that both screenings were sold out in the Omniplex in Lisburn. Not wanting to waste my journey, I plumped instead for 'The Impossible' - a film which I had hoped to see in recent weeks but had become resigned to catching on DVD because of competing demands on my time. Based on the real life experiences of Dr Maria Belon Alvarez and her family, this Spanish-made docudrama deals with the horrific events of 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean which devastated parts of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and many other nations. Juan Antonio Bayona, it's Catalan director, came to international attention five years ago with his remarkable horror movie ' The Orphanage ' about a woman who is flummoxed when her adopted son vanishes. Bayona taps into similar separation anxieties in his lates...

When the analogue era drew to a close, American and Scandanavian drama reigned supreme. However for much of the analogue years some of the best drama was closer to home. Sometimes political, sometimes funny, the drama series has enabled the British TV to nurture some of the greatest writing, directorial and acting talent to hit the small and big screen. Writers like Alan Plater, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett, directors like Jon Amiel, Michael Winterbottom and Martin Campbell and actors like Julie Walters, Sir Alec Guinness and Ray McAnally have all shone and produced some of the finest TV series we have ever seen.  Here's my pick of the analogue crop. T INKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY John Le Carre's classic 1974 spy novel was last year turned into a gripping movie by Tomas Alfredsen, starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley. However 32 years before, veteran actor Sir Alec Guinness turned in an equally compelling performance on BBC1 as the spy call...

Four years ago, the Huffington Post claimed Barack Obama had approached the Presidential Debates like chess while his opponent, Senator John McCain appeared to be playing checkers. Last night's third and final Presidential debate of 2012 was, at times, like a game of chess with each candidate trying to anticipate and block attacks from the other. However, it was a game of chess whose players had clearly forgotten to take off the previous week's boxing gloves. Occasionally, amid all the smart defensive strategies, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seemed to want to lean over the table, sweep their pawns aside and land punches on the other. Korchnoi and Karpov, this wasn't. The debate covered a wide range of issues from Libya and the death of the US Ambassador, to the nuclear threat posed by Iran, the relationship with Israel and trading with China. But as MSNBC's Chris Matthews pointed out afterwards there were other key foreign policy issues which were not...