Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2026)
It is perhaps just as well that In Our Time recently had episodes on Archaea and the Marian Trench (including discussion of extremophiles), because the suspension of disbelief about beings that eat the stars was a little easier.
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Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
“Wuthering Heights” (Emerald Fennell, 2026)
Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)
Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
When I was clinging onto the idea of teaching English Literature, I got three part time gigs teaching nineteenth literature. This was ironical, because as an undergraduate there was an notable gap in my Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (and up to about 1990) that was Victoria Literature. Inevitable I had to teach three different Dickens and three Eliots, but Emily saved me by only having a single surviving novel.
I suspect my only knowledge of it was Kate Bush (which I had seen) and a Cliff Richard musical (which passed me by).
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025)
Hamlet (Aneil Keira, 2025)
I guess I confess to having not read the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, so I don’t know why of the clumsinesses are Hollywood additions. Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) is the stuck at home wife in the 1590s, whilst hubby William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is gallivanting around Shoreditch and the South Bank. All she has to look forward to is childrearing and his second-best bed.
Continue reading →This is Tomorrow (Paul Kelly, 2007)
Finisterre (Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, 2002)
What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (Paul Kelly, 2005)
Kelly + Victor (Kieran Evans, 2012)
So, Paul Kelly has made at least three documentaries with Saint Etienne, a musical beat combo whose work I confess I’m not familiar with, although I’ve listened to some since. And I suspect that means I’m missing something with Finisterre.
Of course, This is Tomorrow is mistitled, because it surely refers to the iconic exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956, featuring artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Richard Hamilton, and many more. Instead, it takes us back to the Festival of Britain in 1951, of which the Royal Festival Hall is one survivor. Designed by Leslie Martin, Peter Moro and Robert Matthew, compromises in building meant the acoustics were not as rich as they might have been. There was an attempt to improve this in 1964, followed by a major restoration and improvement between 2005 and 2007. The documentary shows the festival and then moves into an account of the work. I confess I was interested more in the former than the latter and it’s such a shame the Skylon was destroyed.
Having realised this was a loose trilogy, I then watched Finisterre, which includes extracts from The Shipping Forecast and music from the album by Saint Etienne. It’s a version of the City Symphony genre although, despite some really interesting shots and juxtapositions, doesn’t compare with Manhatta (Paul Strand, 1921) or Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Walter Ruttmann, 1927). It’s a day in the life of the city, from 6.00am to 6.00am at Victoria Station, apparently also biographical of the band. I missed all this, but did like the snark about Camden.
Like This is Tomorrow, Mervyn was commissioned to be performed and screened in the Barbican, and is a depiction of the Lower Lea Valley, at around the time of the announcement of the 2012 Olympics. This coincided with the 7/7 bombing, which is brought in via snippets of news broadcasts. The trajectory depends on the wanderings of a paper boy, Mervyn Day (Noah Kelly, presumably the director’s son) on his rather extended paper route. David Essex and Linda Robson contribute as his grandfather and mother. Presumably his name is taken from a Leyton Orient footballer. It’s diverting enough, I learned a fair bit, and maybe needed to be watched alongside reading Iain Sinclair’s Sorry Meniscus (1999), about trying to walk to the Millennium Dome.
Kelly and Saint Etienne have since collaborated on How We Used to Live (2014), which I haven’t seen.
Evans, co-director of Finisterre, has also made a fiction film, Kelly + Victor, (apparently) loosely based on a novel of the same name by Niall Griffiths. Kelly (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and Victor (Julian Morris) meet at a club and go back to her place where they have violent sex in which she bites and chokes him. Kelly is a shopworker, who occasionally helps out her dominatrix friend, whilst Victor is a romantic who works on Liverpool dock and whose idea of a date is wandering around the Walker Gallery or Sefton Park.
I’m in.
Of course, this can’t end well, so it needs a bit of caution.
Dune: Part One (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
Yes, but what about John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941)?
Continue reading →Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, Claudia Llosa, Chile, 2021)
Samanta Schweblin’s The Man Booker International Prize Shortlisted novel is bought to the screen by her own cowritten (with Llosa) script, which judging by the book review in The Guardian is faithful to the dialogue, although I wonder if there is a new ending. Continue reading →
Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (1938)
Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)
It may be, of course, that I read Rebecca years and years ago — I know I started it and I studied the opening paragraph, the dream of the Manderley mansion from years later, but I’m not sure I got much further. And when I bought two Du Maurier boxsets, I don’t think Rebecca was part of them. It took me a while to track down a copy — although naturally I found several since, as a battered paperback 1992 reprint got more battered as it got carried around.
The conceit should be familiar: lady’s companion Rebecca meets aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter in Monte Carlo and the two have a whirlwind romance, before returning to the ancestral pad in … where we take to be Cornwall but it isn’t named in the book. The new bride finds life at Manderley difficult and the ghost of the dead Rebecca hangs over her, especially through the behaviour of housekeeper Mrs Danvers. A ball would be useful, perhaps, but Mrs Danvers persuades her to wear the same costume as Rebecca had and then it seems as if a wedge has been driven between the loving couple. Then a body is discovered in a sunken boat… Continue reading →
Skriften på veggen ((The Writing on the Wall) Stefan Faldbakken, 2010)
Svarte får ((Black Sheep) Stephan Apelgren, 2011)
Dødens drabanter ((Consorts of Death) Stephan Apelgren, 2011)
I mørket er alle ulver grå ((At Night All Wolves Are Grey) Alexander Eik, 2011)
De døde har det godt ((The Dead Have It Easy) Erik Richter Strand, 2011)
Kalde hjerter ((Cold Hearts), Trond Espen Seim, 2012)
The first series left me with a degree of trepidation – would Hamre be back or has the series jumped the shark. The answer is – spoiler – he is back and so it was worth watching. The friendship gets closer, to the extent that I was expecting him to be written out. No spoilers here. But there is a growing sympathy, especially as Veum gets closer to a new girlfriend Karin (Lene Nystrøm), who appears in a different guise in the novels.
Continue reading →The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci, 2020)
Emma. (Autumn de Wilde, 2020)
There is nothing we seem to like better in the British Film Industry than a literary adaptation — and there have been great versions of Austen and Dickens in the past, so much so that it wasn’t until two hours and four minutes into Emma. that I felt we need another Austen on screen. Continue reading →
The Bookshop (Isabel Coixet, 2017)
Sometimes the gun over the fireplace in Act One is a paraffin heater.
This film works really hard not to be liked. It’s set in and around a bookshop in a small Suffolk village set up by widowed Emily Mortimer, and everybody loves a bookshop. Well, not everybody, because Patricia Clarkson, channelling Glen Close as Cruella de Vil, would rather have an arts centre, for reasons which need not detain us and clearly don’t detain the film. Meanwhile, Bill Nighy, who increasingly leads me to poor viewing choices, is a misanthropic widower who likes books and likes Emily Mortimer. In particular, in turns out he likes Ray Bradbury.
What’s not to like?
Subject to Change 