Nope - I followed the list from the bottom to the top and saw the usual suspects, plus some entirely unknown to me, but while never a big Stones or Bowie fan, I’ve always liked Jagger and Bowie doing “Dancing in the Streets”. Their vocals complement each other surprisingly well, and the much-mocked video was knocked…

It’s weird — I’m a bit of a latecomer to Anderson, having loved Rushmore but hated the ickiness and sentimentality of The Royal Tennenbaums so much it took my son dragging me to see The Life Aquatic to put me back ontrack again. Since then, I’ve increasingly loved his films and, for me, The French Dispatch was one of…

An interesting and informative list (I’ve always wondered where REM got “Superman” from) but I have to break ranks, here, and say that, heretically, I’ve always hated Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares...” No, I haven’t ever heard the original, but while everyone was swooning over the song and the video when it came…

I watched this last night hoping for something fun and thrilling but...nah. Trying to be both, it manages to be neither. It tries to be funny and isn’t, and there’s just so much stupidity in it, including a really clunky reveal, clumps of retrospective exposition that’s supposed to make you go “Ahhh!” but instead made…

You had me intrigued until you mentined The Outwaters, which is an incoherent mess, an illustration of what happens when the “found footage” appears to be done by someone who can’t hold a camera straight or in focus, and the result is endless shots of the ground, blurred indistinct images and lots of panting and…

Yeah, almost with you there. I got Tales on vinyl, but a few years after it was released, and was immediately bored by it. Over the next 10 - 20 years I did my best, but it just seemed utterly pretentious (even by their standards) flat and dull. It was only when, for various reasons, I was taking long coach rides and…

I was with you all the way until Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut. Despite the rancour behind the scenes, I think this is a fine, passionate album with great tunes (Your Possible Past, The Gunner’s Dream and Not Now John to name just three) and a real anger behind it. While most proggers were happy to live in prog-land,…

I actually really enjoyed Firewall. I thought it was an intriguing plot, and Ford was not, at this point, afraid to show his age. His fight scenes are powered by fury but obviously take a toll on his character. I was pleasantly surprised by how good this film was.

Oh, Jesus Wept! I love a good horror film, and on your recommendation I watched The Outwaters last night. It was incoherent, incomprehensible and dull, dull, dull. A found footage film in which nobody apparently knows how to hold or focus a camera, it has forty minutes at the start of meandering shots of people...um,…

Well, I like to be thorough and I’d hate to miss it if anything funny really happened. Because, lordy, I really need a laugh right now.

I ploughed through the first two acclaimed seasons and have started the third. It’s easy to do as the episodes are mercifully short, but I’m still hoping I might find something that’s actually funny.

Oh, and The Wonder. It was brilliant.

A year of film-going so disastrous for me that, towards the last couple of months when some really decent films were coming out, I just didn’t have the energy to go through the disappointment again. We’re a bit behind on this side of the pond, natch, and I only have access to a couple of streaming services, but my…

No Evelyn Ankers? The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mad Ghoul, Son of Dracula, The Invisible Man’s Revenge — I would have thought this would have put her way up in the rankings, but I don’t see her anywhere.

Well, I’ve now watched the second episode and called it a day. On top of everything (not just the gloss but the mediocre acting that doesn’t even give a hint of anything below the gloss, if you can even call it that) there’s also the endless, meaningless jargon. Not only could I not figure out what was going on, I…

And yet Succession, which for some reason this is often compared to (apples and oranges, as far as I’m concerned) manages the balance of humour, humanity and downright dislikeability perfectly. Industry is all surface gloss, shallow vessels displaying nothing but ambition and ego.

I am utterly gobsmacked that there’s a second season of this out there, and not a whisper of it over here in the UK. Partly because, while I watched all of season one (almost two years ago!), I found every single character so lacking in any positive trait, every single one of them so grasping, ambitious, humourless…

This is truly sad. While the second series became a trifle plot heavyand overladen with characters, it remained a thoroughly enjoyable romp, with a stunning lead performance from Suranne Jones, whose asides and glances to the camera were a real thrill to behold.

Well, I’ll miss it terribly. It stumbled a bit in the last couple of seasons and dipped into sentimentality a few too many times,but it’s perhaps the best family saga I’ve ever watched and I was totally committed to it, start to finish.

It was always going to be tough to successfully adapt one of the worst novels every written, with appallingly clunky prose and 2D characters. At least Normal People was ever so slightly better and while the subsequent adaptation made some interesting changes, it also jettisoned one of the few things that make its…