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, through the story of a young, privileged physician (Sharif as the eponymous Yuri Zhivago), his love for his muse Lara (Julie Christie), and rivalry with the well-connected Victor (Rod Steiger) and the revolutionary Pasha (Tom Courtney), over the course of more than three hours we see the collapse of Tsarist Russia and its replacement by the totalitarianism of Lenin and then Stalin.
Lean, as director, is the absolute master of composition and, from the opening scene of labourers leaving their evening shift of work, we have one stunning visual after another. I love the way Lean can borrow from his own imagery: in “Lawrence”, the character portrayed by Sharif is seen approaching us on a camel through the blistering heat of the desert while, in “Zhivago”, Sharif’s character rides on a horse away from from the camera through the snowy blizzard of the Urals.
The star-stunned cast includes Ralph Richardson, Klaus Kinski, Geraldine Chaplin, Siobhan McKenna and Rita Tushingham in supporting roles. Omar Sharif’s real-life son is the young Yuri. Since the source novel was banned in the then Soviet Union (the film itself wasn’t shown in Russia until 1994), most of the filming was done in Spain with weather shots in Finland and Canada. The movie was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won five.
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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 character declares “Right now you got me about as confused as I ever hope to be”.
Next there is the casting with the unlikely pairing in the two leading roles of the British character actor Richard Burton, who does most of the talking and is the only one who seems to know what’s happening, with the American Clint Eastwood, who is known for his laconic characters and here does a minimum of talking and the maximum of killing. In spite of an overwhelming number of German soldiers, Burton and Eastwood survive the odds, helped by an inexhaustible supply of readily available explosives. All this lasts 155 minutes.
And yet … the film was a huge popular success on its release and, when I revisited it more than half a century later, it was at the British Film Institute where the conclusion was greeted with applause. I loved the setting though: the 11th century Schloss Hohenwerfen in the Austrian Alps.
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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 profound.
This time, the narrator – the eponymous Klara – is a robot or, in the language of the undefined future setting, an Artificial Friend (AF). More specifically, she is a B2 from the fourth series, which – although not as top of the range as a B3 – is one with many unique qualities, most notably “her appetite for observing and learning”. While having outstanding observational skills, she has a simplistic view of many matters, most relevantly her belief that the Sun dispenses “special nourishment” and “great kindness”.
Klara is chosen as friend to 14 year old Josie who is ill for reasons which only slowly become apparent. Josie is loved in different ways by The Mother, The Father, Melania Housekeeper, her childhood sweetheart Rick, and in time even by Klara herself and this delightful and moving novel is essentially a meditation on what it means to love.
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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 of a previously-unknown virus and when your nation has a terrorist attack on a mosque and a volcanic eruption on an island – all these incidents resulting in fatalities.
This was what faced Jacinda Ardern when she was Prime Minister of New Zealand for just over five years from October 2017 t0 January 2023.
This remarkable documentary tells this story by skilfully knitting together clips from contemporaneous broadcasts of all those events and many other challenges faced by Ardern, incredibly personal video made at the time and behind the scenes by Ardern’s partner (and later husband) Clarke Gayford who is a professional media presenter, and voice-overs from Ardern herself thinking back over those traumatic events.
What comes out of this film – and her memoir – most powerfully is that Ardern believes in, and tried to practice, a different style of leadership: one that is kinder and more inclusive, one that is less bombastic and more evidence-based.
Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford represent a case study of a different kind of politics, even – dare one say it – a feminist version of politics.
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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 it won the Special Jury Prize.
Shortly before it was screened, the director was sentenced to eight years in prison as well as flogging, a fine and confiscation of his property, but Rasoulof and some cast and crew members managed to flee to Europe in time to attend the festival but now remain in exile.
The film tells the fictional, but all too real, story of Iman (Missagh Zareh), a devout and honest lawyer, who lives with his wife, Najmeh, and their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana. He has recently been appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran and immediately he is required to betray his principles and enslave himself to the regime.
When his newly-provided gun goes missing, he suspects each member of his family and becomes ever-more paranoid and repressive, like the regime itself.
It is a long film (168 minutes), but doesn’t feel its length, because the pace and the tension are ever-increasing, and real images of the 2022–2023 protests in Iran make the narrative convincing and compelling.
The obscure title – explained in the opening moments of the film – refers to a species of fig that spreads by “wrapping itself around another tree and eventually strangling it”. This can clearly be seen as a metaphor for the theocratic regime in Iran.
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A review of “The August Uprising, 1924” by Eric Lee
November 29th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
An earlier book by Lee, “The Experiment” (2017), described, comprehensively and fairly, something unique in Eastern European history: the successful establishment of an independent Georgia, governed on the basis of democratic socialism, from 1918-1921 when it was brutally subjugated by the Bolshevik forces of revolutionary Russia. Now he revisits this place and period to examine the short-lived but consequential uprising against Communist control of Georgia in the summer of 1924.
It is an astonishing story in so many respects. The uprising was known in advance by the secret police, it started a day earlier than intended, it lasted mere days, it was very quickly suppressed, and it achieved very little internally beyond many deaths of the supporters of democratic socialism. Yet, Lee skilfully uses this ‘small’ event as a prism to shed light on major, contemporaneous shifts in the European balance between totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, a disruption in political tectonic plates that reverberates through to today when Russia and Ukraine present such different visions of how society should be run and other European powers have to decide whether and how to become involved.
So Lee’s fascinating work is a wide and deep look at early 20th century socialist history, starting with the so-called October revolution (which he prefers to call – more accurately – the coup d’etat of November 1917) through to the founding meeting of the Socialist International in 1951. The book is meticulously researched and clearly written with a honest assessment of different versions of certain events and an admission about what is still not clear on key features of the uprising.
We inevitably ponder. Why did the uprising take place at all when it was, so obviously, doomed to fail? Why did the Soviet leadership react so prominently to such a seemingly minor event? And how many actually died in the uprising? Lee offers his answers but the death roll is the subject of estimates varying from 320 to 12,578, both equally improbable. What is certain is – in Lee’s words – “That uprising, which was quickly and bloodily suppressed, would be just a footnote in history but for one thing: it provided the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, leading to the final split between the world’s Socialist and Communist parties.”
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The plans for my next book
November 28th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
It’s taken me 13 months, but today I finished writing my next (the fifth) book “Everyone Has A Story”. There are 33 profiles of friends of mine with interesting stories. The profiles are typically around 2,000 words and the total word count is 73,000.
I now have to check through all the text (December), have it proof read by some friends (January), and have it set up and printed by another friend (February). I plan to have a book launch on 19 March 2026 by which time it will be available for purchase on Amazon.
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A review of the important new film “Nuremberg”
November 26th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
Nuremberg: the German city where Hitler held his infamous rallies from 1923 to 1938 and where 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial in 1946-1947. This film centres on the interactions between two men at that trial: Hermann Göring, effectively Hitler’s deputy, and Dr Douglas Kelley, a US army psychiatrist assigned to determine the mental state of the Nazi defendants. The psychological interplay between these two characters is reminiscent of that between Hannibal Lector and Clarice Starling in “The Silence Of The Lambs”, except that the conversations between Göring and Kelley actually happened and were the subject of a book by Kelly. Chillingly, both Göring and Kelley ultimately met the same end.
Göring is portrayed by Russell Crowe in a performance a million miles from “Gladiator” and he has clearly put on a lot of weight which fits him well for this role which he fills with aplomb. Kelly is played by Rami Malek as the moral opposite to his earlier appearance as a Bond villain in “No Time To Die”. in a starry case, there is also Leo Woodall, John Slattery and Richard E Grant.
Shot in Hungary, this is a work with high production values and the use of some actual footage from the liberation of concentration camps and scenes from the trial add to the impact of the work. In the first two-thirds of the narrative, much of the dialogue is expository and often a little melodramatic, but one has to forgive this in a work which attempts to inform and entertain and is, after all, a film and not a documentary. The final third of the film is compelling and much of the wording of Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is verbatim from the actual record of the trial.
The writer and director of this two and a half hour Sky Original product is James Vanderbilt. The messaging of the movie is not subtle but it is hugely important: that the Holocaust is a historical fact that must not be forgotten or forgiven and that Nazi Germany was not uniquely evil but a phenomenon that could happen in other times and other places. “The Zone Of Interest” made the same points more obliquely, but these uncomfortable messages need to be repeated loudly and clearly at a time of growing tendencies to totalitarianism.
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What the best year to have been born?
November 22nd, 2025 by Roger Darlington
The “Guardian” newspaper this week published this letter:
I agree with Julian Richer: the circumstances into which we are born affect how we get on in life (It’s time to bust the meritocracy myth – I’ll be first to say I’m lucky, 18 November). I had a relatively ordinary background and worked in the public sector, but the security I had allowed me to have a good life. As he says, these things are not available to so many children. Considering the wealth in this country, that is a disgrace.
In 2009, the Guardian published an article about 1948 being the best year to have been born. This was based on every aspect of life you can think of: free education, NHS, availability of work, final-salary pensions and opportunities to buy houses at sensible prices. I was born in 1948. What a total privilege.
Mary Mullarkey
I was actually born in 1948. I’ve offered sone notes on “Why it’s fun to be in one’s sixties or seventies in Britain”.
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A review of the new film “The Running Man”
November 21st, 2025 by Roger Darlington
I haven’t read the 1982 novel by Stephen King, on which this film is based, and I haven’t seen the 1987 movie version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it was one of those evenings when I fancied some mindless entertainment and I found that big-time by viewing this 2025 adaptation on an IMAX screen.
The central idea – a mass entertainment television programme that brutalises its players for the enjoyment and escapism of the masses – reminded me of the 1975 film “Rollerball”, but the world it imagines (ironically the novel was set in the year of the release of this new version) is all too redolent of today’s America, a society controlled by media corporations in which surveillance is ubiquitous and inequality and greed are totally dominant.
The female roles are underwritten and the sharpest performances come from Josh Brolin and Colman Domingo in hugely manipulative roles. The eponymous hero, the blue-collar worker Ben Richards, is played by Glen Powell, a rising star who some are calling the new Tom Cruise. He is immensely watchable but, in a messy plot, it is far from clear how Ben has the skills to beat the system and inspire revolution, while the ending is morally nasty.
The film is co-written, produced, and directed by Edgar Wright who has done better work (think “Baby Driver”), but here has a bigger budget that he splashes on noisy action sequences while failing to provide a better script.
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