Pomona Rewind

During last year's awards season, BBC Films gave us a tale of two Hollywood icons in the late autumn of their careers enjoying one last hurrah in Britain and Ireland. For this year's awards season, guess what? BBC Films has given us a tale of a Hollywood icon in the late autumn of her career enjoying a last hurrah in London. Despite good performances from Steve Coogan and John C Reilly as 'Stan and Ollie', Jon S Baird's film failed to cut through during last year's awards season. A different fate would appear, however, to be awaiting Rupert Goold's 'Judy', with its star, Renee Zellweger widely expected to walk away with the Oscar tonight for Best Actress. Goold's film, penned by Tom Edge, is a melancholic look at the dimming of a Hollywood star. At the start of the film, Zellweger's Judy Garland is turfed out of her luxury hotel suite, where she lives with her children, Bella Ramsey's Lorna Luft and Lewin Ll...

An animated French language tale about a severed hand trying to locate its owner seems an unlikely contender to take on 'Toy Story 4' at the Oscars. But that is what is happening at the 2020 Academy Awards, with Jeremy Clapin's mesmerising Parisian story 'I Lost My Body' managing to make the Best Animated Feature shortlist when 'Frozen 2' didn't. Winner of the Nespresso Grand Prize last year during the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Week, Clapin's story has gone on to scoop an Annie Award, as well as being honoured by the San Diego critics. It was also acquired by Netflix which potentially has given it a much wider audience if they are prepared to hunt it down despite the algorithm. Based on Guillaume Laurent's story 'The Happy Hand', the writer has teamed up with Clapin for the screenplay which begins with a hand scuttling out of a fridge in a hospital lab. As it takes its first steps on a journey aimed ...

Nominated for three Oscars, 'The Two Popes' is a vehicle for two of Wales' finest actors. However the vehicle Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles drives is not as lumbering as a Popemobile but glides more like a sleek Mercedes Benz.  It is powered by some clever casting, with Anthony Hopkins portraying the conservative German Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce depicting the more liberal Argentinian Jesuit Pope Francis. It would be glib to characterise this devilishly handsome film as some sort of theological 'Batman vs Superman' tale. The film is much more than that. In fact, it is a rather sweet study by screenwriter Anthony McCarten of two people with different philosophies acknowledging their differences but seeing the person beyond the dogma. At the start of Meirelles' film, Pryce's Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is summoned to the Vatican for the election of a new Pontiff following the death of John Paul II  Hopkins...

Chuck Lorre's 'The Kominsky Method' is not the first sitcom about a couple of grumpy old men. However, with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin playing the two old codgers at the heart of it, it might be the starriest. Netflix's eight part series casts Douglas as Sandy Kominsky, an actor who runs an acting school in LA with his daughter, Sarah Baker's Mindy. Sandy has not quite achieved superstardom but is moderately successful. He is also deluded enough to believe he has great wisdom to impart about the profession. His best friend is Arkin's brusque showbiz agent, Norman Newlander whose wife, Susan Sullivan's Eileen passes away in the first episode after a battle with cancer. Eileen continues to appear to Norman after her death and guide him through life but his loud conversations with a wife that no longer appears to other people makes them believe he is losing his marbles. Over the course of the season, Sandy and Norman comp...

It's the silent movie that has been making a huge noise during the awards season. Michel Hazanivicius' 'The Artist' has been wowing critics ever since it premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival. And last night it further boosted its Oscar frontrunner credentials after it scooped the Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) and Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) at the Golden Globes. But is this French-made movie worth all the hype?  Unquestionably. In a year when Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have been paying their debts to their cinematic forefathers, 'The Artist' is a daring concoction that harks back to a golden age of silent cinema, yet celebrates talking pictures with a message that is hugely relevant to the audiences of today. Hazanivicius' film begins with a silent movie icon, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) riding the crest of a wave. His latest movie 'A Russian Affair' has the audience on its feet at its Hollywood p...

THE DEVILMENT IS IN THE DETAIL Are you getting that sinking feeling about 'Titanic' being re-released in 3D? Do you nevertheless yearn for a movie set on the high seas? Well, thank God, then, for Bristol-based animators Aardman who have returned to our cinemas with a wonderful family film, 'The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists!' The creators of Morph and 'Chicken Run' are back with their first claymation feature since 'Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were Rabbit ' and it doesn't disappoint. Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) is loved by a motley crew of trusty sea dogs that includes  Pirate Second (Martin Freeman), Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson sporting a goofy Dublin accent), Albino Pirate (Russell Tovey) and a woman disguised with a false ginger beard called Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jansen). The crew initially bicker over what's the best thing about being a pirate - is it the scurvy? Is it cutlasses? S...

"In space, no-one can hear you scream". With these seven words, a sci-fi horror franchise was born. In 1979, Ridley Scott's 'Alien' came hot on the heels of 'Star Wars'. As Hollywood sought to cash in on the huge box office success of George Lucas's film with a flurry of family friendly science fiction films such as 'Battlestar Galactica' and ' Buck Rogers in the 25th Century ', Scott pitched his movie at a more adult audience. 'Alien' was dark. It was tense, it was cleverly paced and it was unconventional, giving audiences a heroine, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) when they might have assumed that the spaceship's captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) would have had the principal role. Scott's film was a masterclass in horror moviemaking, slowly building up the tension as the crew of the Nostromo stumble upon a crashed spaceship after picking up a distress signal, only for an alien pod to lash out at one member of the...