Pomona Rewind

'Dallas' is back and is still as crude as the oil as the Ewing family obsesses over. As the 2012 reboot of the trashy, flashy Texan soap opera got underway this week, it was hard not to feel you were travelling back in time to 1978 when the original series first aired. There are some similarities. In 1978, America and Britain were in the grip of a recession. ' The Sweeney ' was on our screens. A likeable Democratic President was struggling to hold onto power in the White House. Young people were emigrating from Ireland and there had just been a Queen's jubilee. But, despite all the difficulties now, it would be wrong to think we have been catapulted back to 1978. The world is a more sophisticated, yet more fragmented place. Instead of three television channels, we have hundreds. Instead of a clunky black or grey telephone sitting in the hall, we carry smart phones around with us that enable us not just to call others around the world but to have facetim...

Derry, Londonderry - whatever you choose to call it - has not had a lot of fictional movies set in the city. Paul Greengrass's powerful 'Bloody Sunday', with James Nesbitt as Ivan Cooper, is probably the best known - although that was mostly shot in Dublin's Ballymun, with only a handful location shoots in the Creggan and Guildhall Square. In 1990, local filmmaker Margo Harkin and the Derry Film and Video Workshop were behind 'Hush A Bye Baby' - an acclaimed low budget drama about a schoolgirl who hides her pregnancy from her Catholic parents. Shot in the city and Donegal, it featured strong lead performances by Emer McCourt and Michael Liebmann and featured Sinead O'Connor in her acting debut in a supporting role. In 1997, the city also featured in a movie 'Bogwoman' by local filmmaker Tom Collins.  Rachael Dowling starred as a Donegal woman who moves to the Bogside in 1958 to eke out a new life for her and her fatherle...

Vivacious - that's the word that best describes the films of Danny Boyle. It's impossible to watch Danny Boyle movies and not be excited about the possibilities of cinema. The Lancashire Oscar winner has produced some of British cinema's most vibrant films - movies that pulsate with joy, with pain, with energy, with beauty. And like all great filmmakers, he does this by stretching visual narrative to its limits and understanding that the most memorable movies contain sequences that fully test the possibilities of sight and sound. That is why, like most great directors, even when his projects don't completely work, you still come away with images seared in your brain. With 10 feature films (including his latest 'Trance') under his belt as well as TV movies, Boyle has shown a tremendous versatility, crossing genres from the modern morality thriller to a magical realist comedy, from zombie horror to science fiction. Boyle has also demonstrated that...

And so, the movie I've been dreading all year has finally arrived. As his 'X Factor' show blasts onto ITV for a tenth series,  Simon Cowell  has been adopting similar blitzkrieg tactics in our cinemas. A documentary about the 'X Factor's' most famous alumni, the world's biggest boyband, One Direction has invaded multiplexes. And with that comes the horrible realisation for mums and dads everywhere that there's no avoiding seeing Commandant Cowell's smug, 'cat that got the cream face' puffed up on a 9 by 21 metres screen. One Direction's fanbase stretches from primary school kids right up to teenage girls. So in the McGinn household, like many homes across the planet, we're occasionally treated to inane One Direction trivia gleaned from TV shows and magazines such as Liam Payne has a phobia of spoons. I've been resigning myself all summer to the inevitable trip to the multiplex to see Morgan Spurlock's  One Di...