owen-watts

Solvan Naim's breezy little series about a man and his dog is like a breath of fresh air. Propelled by fine tunes, low stakes and portions of perfect pups I was totally taken by it. There's a lovely lowkey vibe running through It's Bruno that feels super underrated. I mean, there is also no denying that it's fairly cheap looking and features a few unjustifiable lurches towards "a bigger plot" toward the end. The core concept, the wide cast of silly characters and call-backs are really solid and there feels like bags more sincerity in this than some other, much more expensive, comedies on the platform and indeed off it.

Very rarely do films clamber into your mind and lodge there but this one has successfully done that. In the sense that I watched it a few months ago but it keeps queasily lurching back into my mind. Underpinned by the dark aimless wanderings of nasty narcissitic Johnny, here played with onanistic intensity by David Thewlis. The film is a grotty voyage through early nineties London and feels unendingly cruel. You get Leigh's cartoonish caricatures but drenched in a kind of sweaty 3am glaze of lost wrongs. The worst thing is you definitely know a Johnny, or you worry people think that you are a Johnny. That's why it's still in there. It all got a bit real.

Some films you find, some films find you. This is definitely the latter - and on the strength of seeing the hefty rock soundtrack alone in a discount vinyl bin I decided to watch it. The music is good but it's the bitter viewpoints and dark twists, as well as a totemic central trio in Prior Keitel and Kotto, that really made this a fascinating watch. It doesn't pull many punches and there's some deep brutality in here amidst the occasional comedy sequences. Prior's core performance is genuinely spellbinding and honestly as a directorial debut for Schrader it's pretty solid if a little tonally uneven. Sometimes it's really worth following up on a strange whim in a record bin.

Neil Gaiman's insanely ambitious 90's TV series is a wild ride into a strangely progressive dark pocket of forgotten Brit TV. Filmed on strange cameras and ending up with this odd unvarnished presentation that looks much better in retrospect than it did at the time, bristling with oddments and weirdnesses and absolutely great British character actors. Trevor Peacock? A super young Paterson Joseph and Tamsin Greig? Peter Capaldi as the ominous Angel Islington?? A thousand times yes. It's extraordinarily gawky but strangely endearing, like a lot of Gaiman's work, but is also very recognisably his which is quite an impressive feat in a lot of ways.

Red Dwarf was a show that I was so obsessed with as a child that my teacher wrote to my parents to ask that I be "made to watch" something else. Funny jokes, hard sci fi concepts, solid characters, cool ships, relatable naffness, great guest actors. From the battleship grey days at the Beeb through to the Funchal promised land of Dave. From youthful Alien-inspired eighties exuberance, that weird awkward mid-life crisis period of which we rarely speak to a mostly tasteful old age. The boys from the Dwarf are fabulous, flawed and ever-smeggin-green. To that teacher of a byegone era I say: "swivel on it, punk!"

The great Gordon Buchanan gads about in various cold climes prodding polar bears and the like. It has a compilation quality but Buchanan is always a charismatic draw and footage of him gamely scrabbling about on snowy hillsides is worth the price of admission alone really. Not a lot of it has stuck into my brain, certainly not enough to fill the required characters count here. I was going to write about the etymology of snow but that is dense and not particularly interesting, so I instead thought I'd puncture the idea that that Eskaluet languages have more words for snow than English but actually that turns out to also be quite a dense topic. Better to just make like Gordon and gad about in it.

Why hire good writers, decent TV writers, if you're just going to bludgeon their experience down into this narrow and flawed little box. It's such a shame that this is yet another uneven and poorly structured Disney+ Marvel endeavour as you've got some serious talent here, behind and in front of the cameras. Nice to see a bundle of Rez Doggers and they can get that cash but they just serve to remind you that there are far greater TV shows of this era you could be watching. There's some decent fight sequences too, but throughout there's this nagging desire that if you're pushing the envelope in terms of representation, tone and violence then you should also push it in terms of collaboration and trust.

This hypnotically unpleasant miniseries from the before times actually speaks volumes to all that was to come. Not just in the decades since the incident depicted in the show, but in these few short years too. The real gem of the series isn't it's dogged brutal realism or it's beautifully bruised cinematography but the remarkable cast of European character actors which infest all of it. Harris feels like the "big takeaway" here but really it's folk like Con O'Neill, a pre-fame Keoghan, the great ruddy Alex Ferns, Michael Socha, Peter Guinness and the much-missed Paul Ritter that make it sing. Yes it's full of hard lessons and bloody truths but the characters and the actors that fill them make this as good as it is.

A strong and admirably unflinching examination of one of the most iconic American musicians of the 20th C. The contributors are tastefully chosen and, although initially a bit strange, the decision to use Carl Lumbly to make Davis's own raspy words and blunt musings the "throughline" is a really smart one. It'd be nice to see more artist documentaries build themselves around the actual thoughts of the person. Beyond this, the documentary sadly struggles to walk the line between art and artist, and we get a couple of clunky omissions that feel a little onerous. To skip over his influential electric period almost entirely is a serious shame.

One of an endless mountain of glorious things my partner introduced me to - I've since got weirdly into the breathtakingly complex medieval world of Cadfael and this series serves as a decent taste of general vibe of the world and cast - but sadly robbed of the novel's dense interconnectivity and continuity. You don't even get the same actor portraying Hugh Berringer from one series to the next. Shot on a sprawling set built in Hungary in the 90s and pinned down by a magnificent performance from a commanding (but not particularly Welsh) Jacobi. Beyond a few dated editing choices it also feels oddly timeless, helped by the ethereal soundtrack composed by Colin Towns. A strong contender for best medieval monk-based whodunnit of the mid 1990s.

By strange coincidence this slid into my eyes just days before the great Weathers bicep-handshaked his way into the deep beyond. I saw fabled foundational Pred many decades ago but was struck on a more modern viewing by how gloriously straightforward it is to start and how compelling it's brawntacular ensemble is despite the unquavering silliness of the action premise. By the time we get down to Arnie v the beast though, a stealthy bagginess creeps into the structure of the film and the momentum trips up considerably. Quite rightly the strongest part of this very muscular work remains the work of the Winston workshop.

Timothy Greenberg takes what might be a satisfying philosophical low fantasy film premise in the 1990s and stretches it out into a meandering mini-series that never feels like it can settle on a tone. I'd say I was here for raw power of seeing two concurrent Rudds, but the singularly magnetic Aisling Bea is draw enough. Here, despite occasionally taking centre-stage, she still feels relatively underused as Rudd's perennially exhausted partner. The series runs out of steam in a pretty major way by the end and although I wasn't necessarily expecting a hard sideplot, something outside of the double Ruddle bubble feels like it needed to be going on.

Despite some deeply cringey talking heads (and an awkward "Eyes Wide Shut" heavy vibe) this sprawling documentary made just after Kubrick's death is surprisingly thorough and fairly solid. It's bundled in with a box set of his work and has a lot of folk involved who at least knew him and worked with him and aren't entirely blowing smoke but as a project made in the wake of his death it definitely leans less on the critical and more on the praise and the personal. Folk left in his wake. There's some remarkable young Stan footage in there and a few fascinating musings on his peerless indefatigability which sounded like a bit of a double-edged sword at the best of times.

This achingly sweet little self-contained series sees the earnestly anxious Haru reaching a bit of an existential impass and trying to find herself whilst working at a resort for knackered Pokémon (presumably tired from all the imprisonment and blood sports). It's transfixingly serene and extraordinarily beautiful but so, so brief. It's more like looking at a beautifully made diorama than actually watching a series. I kept finding myself longing for episodes of the old 90s series to be re-done in this beguilingly detailed stop-motion style. Except for the Poké-rap. Nobody needs to see that in more detail.

I didn't know what I was expecting from Tron but I didn't necessarily anticipate that the gender roles would be more dated than the effects and the plot would basically just sort of... happen. It's a great deal of fascinating and ground-breaking effects draped over almost nothing really, which feels a serious shame. David Warner's beautifully malevolent Sark and the atmospherically breezy arcade set are the core memories I took from this and the rest just... cruised over me like some manner of light cycle.

I'm now to add some more characters to this review which I feel doesn't need anything else so I'll just list two roles of David Warner's that I particularly like. The first is Time Bandits the second is in The League of Gentleman's Apocalypse. Thank you for attending my Warner lecture.

Old Attenborough continues to lumber onward like a living fossil (which isn't an insult given how much he loves a fossil) and in the festive period of 2023-2024 we got this documentary about the logistics surrounding the retrieval of a colossal pliosaur skull sticking halfway out of a Dorset cliff-face. The real stars here aren't the twinkly-eyed Attenborough full of boyish joy for the act of discovery but the bizarrely bantering fossilmen Etches & Moore whose job it is to scale down the cliff and get at the skull. The subsequent scans and explorations of the find are genuinely fascinating and there's a nice driving focus throughout that I wasn't expecting. Bonetacular. Bonetastic.

Saw in 2024 with another slab of playful Kemp madness from Rhys Thomas and it was utterly wonderful. This wonky bit of mockmentarianism has everything thrown at it with knowing cameos up the wazoo and occupies the kind of warmly foolish spot on the beeb that folk like Vic & Bob and Harry & Paul used to. That it's the Kemp brothers doing that manner of caper now is still authentically very strange and the more you know, the more you get out of this barrage of silly larking. Eccleston, as in Dodger, is the real force here and even gets a bit of revenge on his Let Him Have It co-star Paul Reynolds. It's... gloriously niche.

CarolQuest Part I

The earliest ever adaptation of probably the most-adapted novel of all time is mostly built around some great theatrical tricks and not much else. Wikipedia insists it's also the first use of intertitles in a film which feels quite an intense mantle to place on it. Bracingly abridged down to about five minutes, and now only surviving as three-and-a-half it's worth a gander (beyond historical fascination) for the door-knocker effect at the very least and the genuinely fascinating choice of projecting Scrooge's youth onto a curtain behind him. Not essential, but fairly atmospheric.

This unexpectedly uplifting (pun intended) Welsh viagra dramedy from Banana collaborators RTD and Matthew Barry was splurged out after Christmas on the BBC and it's a solidly warm little package sculpted out of real events which has some hardness about it but is mostly fairly flaccid. Sorry. What it lacks in punch it makes for with a tremendously good cast, the strength of which alone convinced me to watch it. The great Rheon opposite the deeply underrated Roach are solid leads but it's really Steffan Rhodri's gentle Colin and Mark Lewis Jones's bruised Eddie that steal the show for me and pushes Men Up somewhere really deep. I'm finished.

One of Warner Bros dumped projects that was rescued by Amazon/MGM - this gothic little chrimbo fable sees Mike "Regular Show" Roth do Batman smooshed together with Ronald Searle and you end up with a sort of Gotham Belleville triplets. Utterly spellbinding, endlessly creative and one of the most convincing bat-projects I've seen in quite some time. In my view he's a character that only really works in a silly context and this spindly-limbed morass of high design and deep festive music cuts is really quite silly. Lets hope the promised full series of this also emerges at some point because Merry Little Batman acts as a fantastic opener.

Herzog's zeroing-in on one of his catalogue of death row inmates results in a really fascinating exploration of death and life in 21st century Texas. It's extremely brutal, and judging by some of the reactions to this still, it successfully managed to hold an uncomfortable mirror up to a very dark set of realities being experienced in the lone star state. To dismiss these people as simply stupid doesn't really cover it. That being said, as with all of his documentaries, there's also a deeply strange echo of a Christopher Guest mockumentary about it all. The way Werner manages to tease the quirks of character out of his interviewees is spellbinding. Up there with his best for me.

The second part of the legendary Apu trilogy is far less of a slog than the first, but no less punishing. Here we see the young lad becoming an adolescent and suffering more horrors. The Varanasi setting of the first section is utterly spellbinding... the great crumbling ghats spilling out onto the impossibly wide and lazy Ganges. It's tremendously atmospheric and the choking portrait of motherly affection it gradually reveals feels measured and seriously real. Very few 1950s films have this heady sense of deep reality to them and I find myself approaching the last with a serious dread that I didn't anticipate feeling. What's next for Apu??

Another of Gatiss's flaccid christmas chills from a bygone age. Here you have Conan Doyle's short story about a mummy's curse and stretched out to half an hour it definitely feels like a case of "more is less". There's even a clumsy nod to one of Doyle's more obscure characters. Some... detective chap... which feels rum and misjudged. Up there with his "Thomas Thomas" reference from Doctor Who. These specials are only really worth a hoot because of the casting and the strange plummy dialogue. Always period accurate, but rather stiff sounding. Perhaps he should go back into the old comedy or do a Lucifer Box show instead.

(I watched this on Christmas Eve, hence the pun)

Like any influential film - it's quite hard to see the plot through the morass of what it went on to influence in the decades after. With Yul Brynner's terrifying relentless cowboy you have every slasher film and Terminator, and in the theme-park gone mad you have Crichton's much more influential later work with them dinos. There are a couple of genuinely surprising parts in here, I genuinely enjoyed how bare-bones it all was and how Brolin's character didn't quite go where you expected. Certainly more than just a faceless foundational stone, but not a great deal more.

One of the scores of "Gordon Buchanan meets some nature" docs - he's a charmingly earnest presence as always but this three-parter stretches the format to breaking point a little. Not only that but he got in terrible trouble for sitting in his little plastic box and goading bears to paw at him. Parts two and three descend into quite a tedious game of Gordon-and-Bear (as opposed to cat and mouse) where he worriedly tracks the bear family around an archipelago and wonders if they're alive or not. For ... two straight hours of television. Of all the animal families to tack yourself to, the mysterious and treacherous polar bear is probably one he shouldn't have done it with.