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The Avengers - Season 1
The Avengers - Season 1
1961 | Thriller
Only three episodes of this first season are believed to exist, so it's hard to speak with great authority as to its quality - but the ones we have are brisk, efficient thrillers, as good as the videotaped Honor Blackman episodes (and possibly more coherent). This is 60-year-old TV so the production can be primitive in places, but much of the acting holds up.

Again, judging solely from the three surviving episodes, the arc of the season seems to go from fairly 'straight' stories (Girl on a Trapeze doesn't feature Steed at all) towards the kind of tongue-in-cheek, off-beat material the series is best remembered for (Tunnel of Fear is rather more extravagant, with more of a focus on Steed as an entertaining eccentric). You can almost see the producers figuring out the potential of Patrick Macnee, not that Hendry isn't completely reliable. Not the show in its iconic form, but you can see how it started heading that way very early.
  
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Chris Parnell recommended Annie Hall (1977) in Movies (curated)

 
Annie Hall (1977)
Annie Hall (1977)
1977 | Comedy, Romance

"It would probably be a Woody Allen movie, and I don’t know whether it would be Manhattan, or Annie Hall, or Broadway Danny Rose. Those are my three favorites, but it’s kind of hard to pick a favorite among those. I don’t know. It’s hard. I mean, they’re all three so good. I don’t know. Maybe Annie Hall is my favorite. It’s one of the most lauded certainly. But then you’ve got Manhattan, and the romance of New York City, and you have that obviously in Annie Hall, to a certain extent. Broadway Danny Rose is less often mentioned, I find, but still really amazing with him (Allen) and Mia Farrow. He’s such a character, and Broadway Danny Rose represents all these, you know, sort of loser acts in a way. But it’s such a sweetness to it that I love, and it’s just like all of his – I like all of those movies certainly. So well shot, in beautiful black and white. "

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
2017 | Comedy, Crime, Drama
Three Billboards is a fricking masterpiece, and another home run from Martin McDonagh.

The cast is stacked to say the least. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell both give a career best performance. The supporting cast is made up of the likes of Woody Harrelson, Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish, Lucas Hedges, John Hawkes, Clarke Peters, Samara Weaving, and Peter Dinklage - all who are just great. McDonagh's screenplay is fantastic as per usual, and the runtime is filled with his token dark humour, as well as plenty of emotionally charged events. The narrative is sort of all over the place, with several plot strands all running alongside and throughout eachother, but it's messiness adds to the whole experience, almost like a sort of controlled chaos. All of this is backed by a truly wonderful music score by Carter Burwell.

Three Billboards is just one of those movies that springs off the screen and sticks in your head for all the right reasons.
  
Letters: Summer 1926
Letters: Summer 1926
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"The best book I’ve ever received as a gift was actually the best gift I ever received from my mother, too. When I was young, she gave me “Letters: Summer 1926,” about the three-way correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. Three brilliant minds that had never met, all writing sonnets and passionate letters to each other for four years, eventually falling in love with each other through this correspondence. Seeing this love triangle unfold through actual letters was very exciting for me as a young girl. Later in life, I met Susan Sontag, and she told me she wanted to give me a new edition of a book for which she had recently written the foreword. You can understand my surprise when I discovered it was this very same book. She was always giving me books over the course of our friendship, but this one is the most precious to me, especially since she is no longer with us"

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Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
2017 | Comedy, Crime, Drama
When the police have got nowhere trying to find her daughter's killer, she takes matters into her own hands. Renting out three billboards on a barely used road to town, she plasters her simple question for anyone to see. "How come?"



This was a wonderful start to my 2018 cinema going. It's not often that I say I agree with award winners (especially after La La Land) but this one really did deserve it's Golden Globes.

The star in this one for me was Woody Harrelson. He's aged like a fine wine. I wasn't a massive fan previously, but after War For The Planet Of The Apes, and now this, I can't wait to see what else is to come from him.

Three Billboards in an emotional journey, and captures the way a whole community is affected by what happens inside their borders. It expresses the pain, anger and sadness so well, it was a riveting watch.