Film

• Uproar (2023) - a New Zealand coming of age tale. There are no surprises here. You know exactly what you are getting right from the start, but it is solidly and engagingly done, with some some good performances from Jash Waaka and Rhys Darby particularly.

• House of Flying Daggers (2004) - continuing my SO’s wuxia fad at the moment. This one looks wonderful and has some great set pieces early on but then runs out of ideas and drifts to a stop in a morass of repetitive melodrama and loose ends. Very pretty but frustratingly unsatisfying.

TV

• A Gentleman in Moscow - the pick of the crop at the moment with Ewan McGregor and Alexa Goodall both both proving charming in their respective roles. The tales balences the pre-revolutionry culture, the bolshevic ideals and the grim reality well - although glamourising the former quite a bit, at least initially.

• Renegade Nell - this has a lot of positive reviews, and i certainly enjoyed the writer’s Gentleman Jack, but on the basis of the first episode it seemed to be tonally all over the place, as though the writer had one thing in mind but the director, or studio bosses or someone were trying for something totally different. I found it pretty off-putting and am not sure whether I’ll continue.

• Extraordinary - I thoroughly enjoyed season 1 and am glad to see that season 2 is keeping it up. Some of the novelty value of the superpowers in season 1 has been replaced by more emphasis on the individual characters this time round, but the comedy is definitely still on point.