Archive for December, 2025


A review of the 1965 classic film “Doctor Zhivago”

December 28th, 2025 by Roger Darlington

So many of the brilliantly-talented team that created outstanding “Lawrence Of Arabia”, just three years later crafted the magnificent “Doctor “Zhivago”: director David Lean, scriptwriter Robert Bolt, composer Maurice Jarre, cinematographer Freddie Young and actors Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. Based on the huge, sprawling 1957 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Boris Pasternak, […]

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A review of the 1968 film “Where Eagles Dare”

December 28th, 2025 by Roger Darlington

This wartime adventure is something of an oddity. The strangeness starts with the writing of the screenplay in just six weeks by the novelist Alistair MacLean who went on to turn the script into a novel. Then there is the plot which contains more twists that a corkscrew and is so convoluted that one leading […]

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A review of the novel “Klara And The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro

December 15th, 2025 by Roger Darlington

Ishiguro is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature but has only written eight novels. This is his latest – published in 2021 – and the third that I have read (after “The Remains Of The Day” and “Never Let Me Go”). Like all his work, the writing is deceptively simple but the messaging […]

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A review of the new documentary “Prime Minister”

December 15th, 2025 by Roger Darlington

Whatever omniscient cab drivers think, I can tell you, as someone who has worked for a national government, that governing a country is hard. It is even harder if you’re young and a woman – and pregnant. It’s harder still if you’re prime minister of a country when the entire world is suffering a pandemic […]

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A review of the 2024 Iranian film “The Seed Of The Sacred Fig”

December 10th, 2025 by Roger Darlington

This film, written, co-produced and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is remarkable, both for how it was shot and for what it tells us about the contemporary state of Iran. The work was filmed in Iran in secret and then smuggled to Germany for editing and post-production. It was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where […]

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