A review of the new Korean film “No Other Choice”
February 10th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
From the Korean director of the infamous “Old Boy”, Park Chan-wook’s latest film will not be to everyone’s taste since this surreal black comedy is a tale of mayhem and murder, but it is done with some style and poses a challenging social problem: what do we do when traditional industries – in this case, paper-making – embrace robotics and artificial intelligence to such an extent that almost all the staff are ‘let go’?
In the case of the redundant middle-manager played by Lee Byung-hun, he decides to enhance his chances of re-employment by eliminating his major competitors in the jobs market, but killing them and disposing of the evidence comes with problems in this deliciously entertaining, though rather overlong, macabre story.
Note: The film is an adaptation of a 1997 novel called “The Ax” written by American author Donald E Westlake. It was previously adapted for the screen in 2005 by the Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras to whom the Korean film is dedicated.
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A review of “Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan
February 8th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Set in a small Irish town in 1985, the point of view is that of kindly coal merchant, Bill Furlong. As the story develops, it becomes the author’s response to the scandal of the Magdalen laundries. Claire Keegan’s writing is so exquisite that one needs to read it slowly and fortunately one can because the book is little more than 100 pages. Furlong knew “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything” and asks himself “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”
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A review of “So Late In The Day” by Claire Keegan
February 2nd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her short stories and this one has been published in a stand-alone work of just 45 pages. Set in modern-day Dublin, this beautifully-written tale describes the evolving relationship of Cathal and Sabine and the lack of care in too many young men even today. Sabine offers Cathal an insight into “the heart of misogyny”: “It’s simply about not giving.”
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A review of the classic film “Gone With The Wind” (1939)
February 2nd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Everything about this film is epic. It is set at the most transformational period of American history: the civil war and the reconstruction era. It is based on the very long and hugely popular 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell. It was the second most expensive film made up to that point, with only “Ben Hur” (1925) having cost more. It has a phenomenal running time of almost four hours (but with an intermission). It obtained what was then a record number of Academy Award nominations (13) and wins (19). Allowing for inflation, it has earned more money than any other film in the history of the cinema. Quite simply, any serious fan of films should see this work at least once; I’ve viewed it four times, twice on the big screen.
Although an historical drama, at its heart it is a powerful, but ill-fated, romance between the suave and wealthy, but complicated, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and the strong-willed, self-centred daughter of a cotton plantation owner, Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). The casting of the male lead was never in doubt; producer David O Selznick waited two years for Gable to be available for the charismatic role. By contrast, some 1,400 actresses were considered for the role of Scarlett and the choice of the English Leigh was a surprise.
Historically, the movie presents a highly partisan and politically wrong narrative in which the Southern cause in the civil war is offered as noble and slavery is portrayed as acceptable to white and black. If one can look beyond this, the film is enormously impressive with so many classic scenes, such as the railway station and great fire in Atlanta, and so many memorable quotes, notably Butler’s assertion “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” and O’Hara’s declarations “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” and “After all, tomorrow is another day.”
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A review of the new sports movie “Saipan”
January 29th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Never heard of Saipan? It is the largest island of the Northern Mariana Islands, an unincorporated territory of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean. Never hear of the Saipan incident? This was a public quarrel in May 2002 between the Republic of Ireland national football team’s captain Roy Keane and manager Mick McCarthy when the team was preparing for its matches in Japan in that year’s World Cup.
Does the argument really merit a film? Well, if you’re Irish and/or a football fan, I guess it does and my son, who is a massive football enthusiast, loved it. The central performances, by Éanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as McCarthy are excellent, and the narrative would seem to be a fair account of what happened but, as cinema, I found the work too flashy and frenetic with a kaleidoscope of images and sounds.
Wikipedia page on the Saipan incident click here
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Ever heard of Louis Spohr?
January 23rd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
I hadn’t until I was told about him by a patient to whom I was talking while doing my weekly volunteering at the Older Persons’ Unit of St Thomas Hospital in central London.
According to the entry in Wikipedia:
“Louis Spohr, 5 April 1784 – 22 October 1859), baptized Ludewig Spohr, later often in the modern German form of the name Ludwig, was a German composer, violinistand conductor.
Highly regarded during his lifetime,[2] Spohr composed ten symphonies, ten operas, eighteen violin concerti, four clarinet concerti, four oratorios, and various works for small ensemble, chamber music, and art songs. Spohr invented the violin chinrest and the orchestral rehearsal mark.
His output spans the transition between Classical and Romantic music, but fell into obscurity following his death, when his music was rarely heard. The late twentieth century saw a modest revival of interest in his oeuvre, primarily in Europe, but his reputation has never been restored to that during his lifetime.”
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Why do we need to sleep?
January 23rd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
A new study has shed light on a profound connection between humans and jellyfish while illustrating the importance of one of the most fundamental human needs. According to “Discover Magazine”, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel discovered one of the biggest reasons animals rest and sleep, courtesy of looking at jellyfish and other species without brains but with nervous systems.What they found was that sleep and rest are essential to protect neurons from DNA damage.
Neurons, or nerve cells, are the core of all animals’ nervous systems, allowing brains to communicate with the rest of the body and controlling animals like jellyfish that lack brains. The researchers found that neurons accumulate damage to their DNA during waking hours and that sleep is essential to giving those cells a chance to repair that damage and avoid long-term issues.Researchers discovered that jellyfish, zebrafish, and sea anemones all maintain schedules that include at least eight hours of sleep and rest, a cycle that closely mirrors that of humans.
“Our findings suggest that the capacity of sleep to reduce neuronal DNA damage is an ancestral trait already present in one of the simplest animals with nervous systems,” said Lior Appelbaum, the principal investigator of the Molecular Neuroscience Lab at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University.
Scientists have long wondered about the reason behind sleep, as it seemed to serve no basic purpose. Time spent sleeping or resting is time not spent hunting, eating, or mating, and leaves the animal vulnerable to predators. Experts previously speculated that sleep was for dreams, to provide the body time to rest and recover, or to help memory transfer in the brain.
So we do need sleep, sone seven-nine hours a night. But: are you getting enough?
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A review of the new book “This Is For Everyone” by Tim Berners-Lee (2025)
January 22nd, 2026 by Roger Darlington
The World Wide Web is one of the most transformative technological developments in the history of humankind. It was invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 when he was 34 and working at CERN in Switzerland. He chose to give it to the world for free.
In 1999, he wrote a book called “Weaving The Web” in which he explained why and how he developed the web and described its early evolution. At that time, the Internet was being used by around 150 million people. A quarter of a century later, Berners-Lee is nearing the end of his illustrious career and the web now has over 5.5 billion users or close to 70% of the global population. His new book is very readable, if rather unexciting, and it is part memoir and part manifesto.
The memoir material sets out how both his parents were mathematicians and electrical engineers, how he did a degree in physics at Oxford University, how he conceived the web as simply “the slow and patient crystallization of an idea”, how he created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to formulate evolving standards for different features of the web and the the World Wide Web Foundation to promote the greater use of the network, and how he has pushed for more open use of data through initiatives like the non-profit Open Data Institute and his new business Inrupt (a name combining the words ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’).
He invented URLs, HTTP and HTML – all of which are still the beating heart of the web. He writes about the browser wars (Viola vs Mosaic and Netscape vs Explorer), the growing dominance of a small number of behemoths (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta), and the huge impact of artificial intelligence: “I’m not terrified of AI. But I think that we do have to control it.”. Along the way, we learn about some of the many awards that he has received, his three wives two children, and three stepchildren, his love of sailing, and his admiration for Wikipedia (“probably the best single example of what I wanted the web to be”).
The manifesto element is driven by his concern at how the web has developed: “I had known for a while that something was wrong with the web. What was intended to be a tool for creativity and collaboration had become divisive, polarizing and toxic.”. He writes: “I generally oppose the regulation of the web” and “My feeling is that regulation should be minimal”, but he does want to see regulation of “the addictive algorithms”.
He came to resent the commercialisation of the web: “The user had been reduced to a consumable product for the advertiser. Expectations of privacy, of dignity, of sovereignty, had been corroded in the quest for profit.” Above all, he wants the user to have complete ownership and control of their data, to be able to hold all of it in one place, and to be able to link any of their data with any other data.
Therefore he is pushing hard for something which he used to call Personal Online Data Stores or pods but which he now terms ‘data wallets’ which would be enabled through a new protocol called Social Linked Data or Solid. Optimistically he declares “I anticipate the growth of Solid as being similar to the growth of the web.” Really?
Berners-Lee is a brilliant man, liberal and humanistic, motivated by people rather than profit. But perhaps he is simply too idealistic. I believe it is too late to regulate the Internet as some of us argued and too improbable to expect that we can now reclaim ownership of our data from the monopolistic giants who control the web.
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A review of the new award-winning film “Hamnet”
January 18th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
We know so little about the life of the greatest English writer William Shakespeare, but that does not stop us wanting invented stories about him including earlier films “Shakespeare In Love” (1998) and “All Is True” (2018). What we do know is that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died aged 11 in 1596, that three years later the Bard wrote his most famous play “Hamlet”, and that – as this film tells us in its opening shot – in those days Hamnet and Hamlet were different pronunciations for the same name.
It is from that sparse knowledge that Maggie O’Farrell crafted her hugely successful 2020 novel, a book I’ve not read but one consumed with devotion by many of my women friends, including my partner with whom I saw this film. The novel is non-linear and structured around interior thoughts, whereas the film is linear and necessarily visual, but the essence of the book is maintained in the film by O’Farrell being both co-produced and co-scriptwriter.
For such a quintessentially English story, it’s striking that, as well as Farrell, the lead actors – Paul Mescal as William and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes – are Irish, while the director is Chinese, Chloe Zhang who won an Oscar for “Nomadland”. But the film is a triumph and Buckley is simply outstanding in this heart-wrenching tale of grief. This is an England both bucolic and bubonic, when life was precarious, but theatres like the Globe staged stories that would live for ever.
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Happy birthday (and thank you) to Wikipedia
January 15th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
On 15 January 2001, a new online encyclopaedia was born: it was originally called Nupedia. The concept then was to invite experts to contribute articles and, by the end of the first year, they had a grand total of 22. The next year was not that much better.
The plan changed dramatically when the founders decided to use the idea of the wiki which enables any Net user to contribute an article or to edit one. In the first two weeks of the new approach, they had more articles than in the two years of Nupedia.
In October 2007, I wrote a column entitled “Is Wikipedia the best site on the web?” I concluded: “After years of using the site literally every day, I am a huge fan. It is not perfect, it is not brilliantly written, but it is hugely informative and very user-friendly. As a starting point to learn about a topic, it is currently unbeatable.”
At that time, Wikipedia had almost two million articles in English. It now has over seven million. But Wikipedia is a genuinely global resource with material in over 240 languages totalling over 66 million pages.
All this is done by volunteers, anyone can create or edit a page, and the whole thing is free to anyone with an Internet connection.
The inventor of the World Wide Web, the British Tim Berners-Lee, has written in his new book “This Is For Everyone”: “Wikipedia is probably the best single example of what I wanted the web to be” and calls it “an invaluable repository. of human knowledge that I consider one of the modern wonders of the world”.
I use Wikipedia every day. I’m so impressed at its scope and quality and so appreciative of its free availability that I donate to it each month.
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