Woolf Works – stunning Royal Ballet Production, with choreography by Wayne McGregor and music by Max Richter, as filmed by the BBC in 2017 which I've only just got round to watching. There are three movements, based (loosely) on Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves. They're all impressive (see excerpt on YouTube) but it's the third which is the most powerful, opening with a reading (by the excellent Gillian Anderson) of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter / love letter to her husband: the last thing she wrote before she drowned herself. The dancers perform in front of a stage-wide slowed-down video of the waves of the sea, while Max Richter's music rolls around a repeating cycle, starting quietly and gently but growing imperceptibly on each turn until after 20 minutes you realise that you are completely overwhelmed. Very sad, very beautiful, very true. (It's due to be shown at cinemas in February 2026.)
My Brain: After the Rupture – Very painful TV documentary, following the musician and radio presenter Clemency Burton-Hill as she recovers from a brain haemorrhage, which initially left her unable to speak or walk. This would be a devastating injury for anyone, but especially so for someone like her who is highly driven to succeed, and there are many times in the film where she weeps out of sheer frustration. For a documentary, it has an unusual style, designed I think to bring us as vividly as possible into her experience. When we see her walking through the streets of New York, for example, a hand-held camera follows her closely, so that the chaotic sounds of unseen traffic give us the expectation – derived from numerous drama films – that she is about to be hit by a car. She isn't, but the device makes us feel just how scary it must have been for her to navigate an ordinary streetscape. A powerful piece of film-making, fully up to the challenge of its material.
Old Skies – After their critically and commercially successful Unavowed, indie studio Wadjet Eye have once again proved that it's possible to create a really great 2D point-and-click adventure game, if you have a cracking story, characterful dialogue writing and top-class voice acting. You play Fia Quinn: a time traveller whose job is to escort time tourists on trips into the past. Inevitably each mission goes wrong in some way (otherwise there would be no game), and you as Fia have to save the situation and fix the timeline, which is great fun with brilliantly-designed gameplay. But there's an overall storyline too, starting with a fault-line in her character, which cracks and widens over the course of the game. When we first meet her, she is in full denial about the emotional toll of her work, and scrupulously avoids any form of attachment, since alterations to the timeline mean that anything and anyone can vanish at any moment. She doesn’t bother to notice the shops in the street, knows nothing about art and doesn’t even follow sport since the personalities are constantly changing, and close relationships outside of work are completely out of the question. Yet over successive missions, despite the repeated injunction to “focus on the job”, she discovers things and people about which and whom she does care. And when her suppressed feelings burst out in an emotionally (and literally) explosive final chapter, the story builds to a tragic (or happy?) but deeply satisfying conclusion. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf on George Eliot's Middlemarch, this is one of the computer games written for grown-up people. (See my full review here.)
To the Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager – documentary film, for which I joined the crowd-funding. Less notable than the companion documentary on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by the same team, for which they re-united the writing team to plot out an opening episode for an imaginary eighth season, set some years after the show’s finale (see crowd-funding trailer). No such grand stunts here, but a pleasant enough reminiscence, reminding us how good the show was and how important Jennifer Lien’s Kes was to the early seasons. The best part was seeing footage of Genevieve Bujold, originally cast as Voyager’s captain, in familiar scenes from the pilot episode. (By mutual consent, she left the show after only a few days shooting; she certainly brought gravitas to the role, but her method acting was a poor match with Star Trek’s technobabble. Fortunately, Kate Mulgrew, rapidly cast as her replacement, owned the bridge immediately, as much as if they’d cast Katherine Hepburn, whom she resembled visually and aurally.) However, we didn’t need to see Garret Wang (Ensign Kim) taking a parabolic flight to experience weightlessness, which was probably fun for him but not so much for us.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera – important book on the British Empire and its cultural legacy, but for me it felt worthy rather than provocative or insightful or consciousness-raising - perhaps because I was already familiar with the broad outlines of the picture, but also because of his index-card methodology (as we used it back when I was a historian): collecting facts and writing each on an index card (or its digital equivalent), then sorting them into categories and writing them up. It's an easy way to produce a book, and careers have been built on this, but it's not a way of getting at the big historical questions (such as why), so reading history of this kind tends to feel like looking through a scrapbook. Admittedly the scraps or cuttings are pretty strong and shocking (the naked racism and brutal repression puts Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank into perspective), but the definitive post-colonial history of the British Empire still remains to be written. In the meantime, I remain more intrigued by Adam Curtis's argument that a dominating force in sixties and seventies British culture was grief over the loss of empire (as in the first episode of his Can't Get You Out of My Head)
Andy Warhol’s America – exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery. I'm not a big fan of Andy Warhol, so the main interest of this exhibition for me was what the individual exhibits said about the times of their creation - and given that I found most of them nasty and unpleasant (even his 1950s fashion magazine drawings, which were presumably intended to be beautiful or at least stylish) this gave a bleak and unhappy aspect to the times. In a perverse way, I found this encouraging; people back then felt the world was falling apart and that culture was coming to an end, just as many of us feel now - and yet, the world didn't end and culture passed through its adolescent trauma to achieve some new kind of temporary stability, so perhaps it can do so again. The only pieces I really liked were the famous ones – the screenprints of Marilyn Monroe and so on – but I did like his short films on continuous display, especially one of a beautiful woman (a contemporary actor, singer or model I think), the camera (us) just looking at her face for several minutes, much longer than is normal or comfortable. I was also amused by the gallery caption on his screenprint based on the US Army camouflage design, noting that he'd totally undermined the design's purpose by rendering it in bright colours!
Mask of the Rose – visual novel, which I played chiefly because it was written by top-rated game writer Emily Short. The design aim, as I understand it from her blog post, was to give the player a lot of freedom and agency in how you develop your relationships with the various non-player characters, to the extent that one reviewer called it a "dating sim", but I found the extent of freedom baffling; I couldn't really see how my actions were affecting things, and conversations kept on being cut short when I wanted to continue them. Nor could I figure out how to work the critical game mechanic of story construction, which you can use to shape conversations – especially important when you're investigating the murder which takes place mid-way through. The game takes place in "Fallen London": the setting of a number of recent games, the central premise being that Victorian London has literally fallen beneath through the surface of the earth, so that Londoners now go about their lives amongst demons, talking animals, and Lovecraftian eldritch creatures – which I found quite fun, but ultimately unsatisfying because I could never tell whether the interesting things I was discovering about the environment had any bearing on the story, or even whether there was a story at all. One guide said that you get more out of the game if you play it several times, to explore the various different options and possibilities, and I did try re-starting to see what I could make different. But although the writing was good, I didn't find it so good as to warrant replaying the same or similar dialogue trees over and over again (unlike, say, Old Skies, see above, which I have played three times in quick succession, with scarcely diminished enjoyment) – so I resorted to watching a walkthrough to find out how the story (such as it was) ended, and discover the answer (or at least one answer) to the murder mystery. Just not my thing, I think.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 – I enjoy the recent Mission Impossible films, but not so much to pay to see them at the cinema, so what I watched was the freeview television premiere of the penultimate film, coinciding with the cinema premiere of the sequel (Final Reckoning). Total hokum, but completely gripping, once again using the neat device of inter-cutting between action scenes in different locations, thus amplifying the tension. It actually views better a second time, when it's easier to overlook the clunky expositional dialogue and you can take in more detail when you know what's going on. I still maintain that the Mission Impossible films most resemble the silent films of Buster Keaton, despite being thrillers rather than comedies: not just because of their death defying stunts but because of what Keaton called "surprises" and one reviewer called "holy shit!" moments – of which there are many in this film, notably the climax with a train dangling off the edge of a bridge, successive carriages being pulled over and falling off one by one. I was sorry to lose the character of Ilse Faust (played by Rebecca Ferguson), because she was the true equal of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), but I guess you can take the role of "mysterious woman" only so far and she had to make way for a new romantic interest. At least in this film she got to look very cool and bow out in style.
Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li – profound meditation on living with tragic loss, which will surely take its place alongside other bereavement classics as C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and (less well-known) Julian Barnes's Levels of Life (see my comment). Li is in the awful position of having both her sons commit suicide, separately, a few years apart. Her feelings are clearly profound and terrible, but she mistrusts talk of “grief” or “the grief process” because she finds people often use that to mean something which you go through, after which you’re all right again and things have gone back to normal and they don’t need to be embarrassed around you any more. For her, things will not be normal again; an end point to her sorrow is neither expected nor desired. “The abyss is my habitat,” she writes. “One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.” A good book to spend time with, in small doses, because it is concentrated and powerful.
Where Dragons Live – strange and atmospheric documentary, following three middle-aged children going through the contents of the parents' rambling country house, prior to it being sold after their deaths. There's a flavour of English eccentricity (the parents Charles Impey and Jane Mellanby were an art historian and a neuroscientist, so highly-educated rather than posh – the house was bought with the proceeds of the sale of a tiny medieval painting) and a cultural world in the process of vanishing, as evident in the comments of the grown-up children and the preternaturally articulate grandchildren. A sad, meditative film.
The Salt Path – lovely, lovely film, telling the true story of Ray and Moss Winn (played sensitively by Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs), who lost their farm and home after an investment went badly wrong, and homeless and dependent on benefits determined to walk the South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset. What is really beautiful is how the couple support and take care of each other; at the beginning it's mainly Moss who needs looking after, when his physical weakness (he's been diagnosed with a terminal condition) makes you wonder how he's going to make it ten miles let along the whole coast path, but later it's him looking after Ray, most charmingly when he notices her eyeing hungrily a woman eating lunch at an outdoor cafe and launches into an impromptu reading from Beowulf to a gathering crowd, which raises enough money for them to have a proper meal. A happy ending, not just because they eventually got back their financial security (her memoir of the walk became a best-seller) but because they discovered something about how to live, and live beautifully together.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester – an impressive collection of modern (post-1900) British art, my favourites being an installation by Rana Begum hanging in the main stairwell (looking like a vast bunch of balloons except that the balloons are semi-transparent, pastel coloured, and pillow-shaped, being actually made from wire mesh, sprayed with coloured powder), Victor Willing's ‘Self-portrait at 70’ (actually a prospective piece, because he didn’t live beyond age 60, haunting and striking, but not sad, maybe his accepting the reality of growing and being old) and the model art gallery (a dolls house art gallery filled with miniature real artworks by contemporary artists, contributed during the 2020-21 Covid lockdown when they couldn’t exhibit normally).
Anna Karenina, at the Chichester Festival Theatre – proper theatre, in intimate surroundings, with a snappy script delivered with power and at pace by a wonderful cast, changing costume and sometimes roles (notably when secondary actors became chorus-like members of a crowd or society as a whole). Good work by Natalie Dormer, holding firm the central role of Anna, and also David Oakes (her off-stage partner) as Levin, the other key character. A skilful production, swinging from comedy to tragedy in an instant, with characters' internal dialogues delivered as asides while never interrupting the action. I heard one audience member complaining about the use of twenty-first century profanities, which admittedly aren't authentic, but you know what, the actors weren't speaking Russian either, and I thought the swearing was well-judged: delivering shock when shock was needed. A pity we don't get this kind of thing at Milton Keynes Theatre any more.
Weald and Downland Living Museum – a brilliant collection of historic buildings, from medieval times to the 19th century, rescued from demolition (for road building, shopping centre development etc) by being transported and re-erected on this site. Impressively, many of the cottages and farmhouses have been given gardens, planted with contemporary selections of herbs and vegetables, hinting at how the household economies worked. A great place to wander around, with a woodland trail (including working timber mill and charcoal burning), a mock market square, and a large duck pond overlooked by the visitor centre café. A beautiful place, clearly much loved by the many volunteers who will sensitively engage you in conversation about the buildings and the history. A southern and agricultural counterpart to the northern and industrial Beamish, which I see has just won the Arts Fund Museum of the Year award.
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