Here’s another gem you should hunt out…

An interview I did with the director of one my favourite short films from ECU. Later we got drunk and he tried to make me ride a bicycle.

Divining the balance between how much a film festival programme represents its submissions and how much it represents its selectors is one of those impossible but fascinating chicken and egg questions. Naturally the programme has to reflect both but I hope for the sake of everyone living in Europe that this year’s ECU programme isn’t purely a reflection of the continental mood – for if it is then we are very unsettled. The clearest and most eloquent expression of this…

Woody Allen is clearly a very clever man. About halfway through his latest utterly mediocre film “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger” I had to admit I was almost enjoying myself and I had to ask why. The photography is banal, the script often dire and the performances directionless, swinging from surprisingly good to astonishingly bad often within the same scene. I realised though that I was being kept surprisingly happy just by the fact that it wasn’t “Whatever…

Ah dear me, apologises to those who enjoy my ramblings here but the past few weeks have been astonishingly hectic and I’ve had to forsake blogging for sleeping, and not much at that. Apologises also to those of who you despise the arrogant, self-opinated, me me me blather which is this blog because I’m back… though the internet’s a big place so I’m sure there’s plenty of other places you can be. Whether I’ve left you distraught or delighted by…

Obviously I didn’t expect “Tron: Legacy” to be any good, no film with a colon in the title ever is. I wasn’t disappointed, it really is pretty terrible. It was always going to be interesting to see how they dealt with the original film’s central conceit, that inside a computer there is a totalitarian state and the characters we dispatch in our gaming are actually the victims of Roman style gladiatorial justice. This is a silly idea but a compellingly…

Last night I saw a preview of Gareth Edward’s feature debut, “Monsters” which opens across the UK on Friday. As fellow filmmakers I urge you all to go and see it. As an achievement in filmmaking it ranks alongside “The Lord Of The Rings” as an utterly exhilarating exploration of the possible. It is, without doubt, an inspiring example of what can be done. If you are a filmmaker then “Monsters” is a gauntlet thrown at your feet. I imagine…

Tangled Up in Blue – Trailer from Haider Rashid on Vimeo. Is a new independent British film which is gaining attention across the world. I’ve not seen it but I’m glad to see it stars Ian Attfield, an actor who first came to my notice through the many fantastic shorts he made with director Carlo Ortu. It’s currently playing at the Shortwave Cinema in Bermondsey and you have until the end of the month to catch it. Also if you…

Lets get a few things straight. A graphic novel is vastly more complicated than a cartoon strip. Compared to the 118118 adverts in the bottom of the Metro, Alan Moore is Dostovesky. Nevertheless we should not forget that all things are relative – compared to The Idiot most graphic novels might as well just be a 3 pane strip advertising a phone directory service. The 118 strips are piece of daily visual flotsam for any Londoner using the tube. For…

Anyone who read my previous post calling for a more intellectual approach to film criticism and felt a twinge of excitement or hunger should hunt down Michael Wood’s writing on film which regularly features in… yes, where else, the London Review of Books. Here is the end of his superb piece on Five Easy Pieces… “Dupea thinks piano practice is just practice, a form of avoidance, and claims to have played a certain Chopin prelude better when he was eight…