Kester Brewin

Having been urged by lots of After Magic readers to go and see Iron Man 3, I saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The series has always had more biting wit that similar franchises, and has done well combining that with some thoughtful content too. I don’t want to talk much about the [...]

Spoiler alert: there’s really not a great deal of fundamental narrative action in this film. No twists to reveal. But if you’d rather not know too much about the film before you see it, don’t read on. // I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film The Master on Friday night. Here’s the thing: I sent [...]

Just been to see the new Spiderman movie this evening. It’s really enjoyable – another good ‘creation myth’ for a superhero – but left me with some niggling questions, which I’ve been mulling on since. Spoiler alert… One of the key questions for films of this genre is ‘how do they become…?’ How does Spiderman [...]

  I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV [...]

I’ve enjoyed seeing Avatar – most recently at a very late night showing at the BFI Imax cinema. It’s not brilliantly plotted or scripted, but a great spectacle nonetheless. However, I found myself focusing on a problem that 3D cinema has compounded – especially in the immersive environment of Imax. Because the screen is so [...]

I went to see Charlie Kaufman’s latest piece last night – Synecdoche, New York. I highly recommend it. For those familiar with his work, Kaufman continues to explore the problems of consciousness, and, in particular, the problem of mediating what is in our heads to those around us. He has mined the seam of the [...]

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It’s a terrific movie. If you haven’t yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you’ll need to see this one on the big screen. Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men [...]

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr…. ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman’s anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid [...]

A strange and beautiful weekend. We were down in Bristol, seeing some good friends. In one of those marvellous moments, I found myself taking the complimentary tickets of a multi-Oscar-winning animator to see the World Premier of the new score to the 1920′s classic He Who Gets Slapped. Will Gregory, of Goldfrapp fame, had written [...]

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, [...]