Life Force

Sort of a 1970s British horror picture made 20 years too late, and missing a lot of the sense of irony and archness as a result. The male lead was, apparently, a method actor, which is probably not the best person to hire to play an astronaut haunted by a nude lady space-vampire, and he has a psychic link with her which is a scarily obvious plot-moving device (he knows her plans when the plot has to move, he doesn't when there's still half an hour left and the movie has to tread water a while). Also some regrettable animatronics.

It's A Thing: Last Christmas

Tangerine Dream. I'm so sorry.

Moffat-Era Tropes: Mildly embarrassing revelations about characters' childhoods. Timey-wimey. Variants on the phrase “timey-wimey” (here, “beardy-weardy” and “dreamy-weamy”). People living in virtual worlds or dreams and being unaware of this fact. Doctor leaves companion and returns when she's an old woman (seriously, that hideous old-person makeup was possibly the worst thing about this episode). “Don't blink” (in this case, close your eyes and don't think about the sleepers). Zombified people marching about until being ordered to go back to bed (see “The Doctor Dances” for the prototype version). Meeting a mythological figure who can't possibly exist. Significant messages appearing on a blackboard or wall. Scottish jokes. References to classic Christmas stories (e.g. “God bless us every one,” or the visual of people soaring over a festive London). MILF. Things coming out of TV screens at people. Referring to a companion's husband by the companion's name (“is there a Mr Clara?”).

It's not a trope, but mad props for including a visual reference to Cocteau's avant-garde film Orphee (Clara standing still as the background recedes behind her, which happens in Cocteau's film when characters journey through the underworld).

A Thing in a Thing: A dream in a dream in a dream in a dream in a dream.....

The Doctor is A: Dream.

The Master Is A: Dream.

Clara Lies About: In a totally foreseen development, Clara and the Doctor find out that they lied to each other last episode.

Reasons Clara Should Drop Danny Like A Hot Potato: Because, although the dream-Danny we meet is a complete gent, he is, as he himself points out, dead, and not going to come back.

Child Count: One (briefly).

The Thick of It: Didn't spot anything, but Red Dwarf would like a word.

It's Actually About: The tangerine on the windowsill at the end of the episode, and the Doctor “waking up” by the volcano from “Dark Water” shortly beforehand, indicate that we're still in a dream (a tangerine dream, presumably), and the fact that Santa Claus turned up in the Tardis at the end of “Death in Heaven” indicates that we have been in a dream for some time. Therefore, a certain percentage of Doctor Who, and potentially all of it, is actually a dream. This, consequently, not only retroactively makes sense of all the daft ideas and continuity problems that have gone before, but effectively insulates the entire series against future snarking. So much for this column, then.

Transnational

Snowpiercer: possibly the most scarily accurate allegory of this decade yet to be filmed. Or, to put it another way, it's Piketty on celluloid.

Movie count for 2015: 1

Anthropomorpheous, in the underworld

Orphée: A rewatch-- a surreal film which maps the Orpheus legend onto the tensions and politics of the arts scene in early-Fifties France. Slightly undermined by the ending, which got a little too self-congratulatory, but worth putting up with that for the rest of the movie.

Movie count for 2014: 69

Aptly named

Meet The Feebles: I'd heard this was a scatological and offensive but daringly funny cult movie. I'm fine with scatological and offensive, but I generally prefer it when it comes with an actual plot, and/or a point beyond just trying to be shocking for shocking's sake, neither of which this has.

Movie count for 2014: 68

Pointless Celebrities

Doctor Zhivago: Beautifully shot but ultimately frustrating film about the Russian Revolution, or, more accurately, about the events of the Russian Revolution passing Omar Sharif by as he tries to get it on with Julie Christie. Further enfrustrated by the periodic hints that the supporting characters are much more interesting people involved in much more interesting personal dramas, but enlivened by the fact that the ending has a subtle but definite pro-Communist message that the various awards committees seem to have missed.

Movie count for 2014: 67

The Revolution Will Be Novelized

Mockingjay, Part I: Fairly good adaptation of the first half of the novel, with some good messages for teens about propaganda, and about how the enemy of one's enemy is not necessarily one's friend. I was slightly taken out of the narrative because of recognising too many of the actors in it (Queen Margaery had a second career as a photojournalist, who knew?), and the cat pretty much stole every scene it was in, but that was all fairly tolerable.

Movie count for 2014: 66

Closeted

Skeletons: Surreal British drama-ish thing about two psychic investigators, sort of, who go around exposing the skeletons in people's closets, sort of, and who meet their nemesis when investigating a missing person. Sort of. It's all a bit hard to summarize, but it really is worth seeing.

Movie count for 2014: 65

The House in the Middle

Kiss Me Deadly: Starts out as a conventional film-noir thriller with a distressed blonde flinging herself into the life of a hard-boiled private detective. Eventually turns into an eerie story about nuclear paranoia and the Manhattan Project. Sort of "The Big Sleep" meets "Edge of Darkness", with more sex.

Movie count for 2014: 64

Entertaining June

Brazil: A repeated rewatch (I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it), this one distinguished by having seen it at the BFI with a talk afterwards by Terry Gilliam, and by getting to meet Gilliam afterwards. Film's still brilliant, Gilliam is too.

Movie count for 2014: 63

What's Wrong with the 1970s

Serpico: Biting expose on police corruption, through a biopic of New York policeman Serpico, an innovative and perceptive undercover detective whose honesty and integrity puts him at odds with almost the entire political and law enforcement establishment. It's depressing how little has changed in some ways.

The Candidate: Biting satire on the corrosive influence of politics, as Robert Redford's young lefty activist slowly morphs into a compromised and compromising career politician. You can see where it's going right from the start, but that's sort of the point.

Movie Count for 2014: 62

Cyclo Tron

Tron: A genuinely groundbreaking film on a number of levels, with the technical innovation (the graphics still look amazing over 30 years later) being matched by the playful postmodern referencing of (particularly Soviet) Expressionist film, Christian mythology and video-game imagery. The message is very much of its time (good capitalist/entrepreneur triumphing over bad capitalist/corporation), and there's only one woman in it (to be fair, she's a scientist who's presented as such without any fanfare, and she's far from a passive "prize", freely choosing between two good-looking and intelligent men), but both are easily forgivable.

Tron II: A vastly inferior sequel. There was one major visible technical innovation (the use of a virtual actor, of sorts, to play the young Jeff Bridges-- one step closer to the world of Idoru), but otherwise it was a banal-looking, too-long story with little message other than that the baby boomers think their Generation Y kids are miserable slackers who don't understand them, and which turned the playful virtual world of the first series into a lame collection of well-worn tropes. Michael Sheen was sort of fun to watch though.

Movie count for 2014: 60

Grauniad

Guardians of the Galaxy: Watchable superhero flick; the action scenes got pretty boring and it was half an hour longer than it should have been, but there was some good humour and interesting worldbuilding, and a sort of Firefly-esque self-awareness.

Movie count for 2014: 58