I just came across this old shot and wondered if I might take the opportunity to pioneer a new critical form… All contributions welcome; the parameters are self-evident.

First off, a disclaimer: I already pay tribute to the ‘local/sustainable/quality ingredients’ gods, so in a way this pilot episode feels like it’s preaching to the converted. However, where else on television can you get Michel Roux Jr and the Hairy Bikers on the same bill?

The premise of the programme is simple: each celeb foodie adopts a neglected British food and ‘campaigns’ to revive it in our hearts and homes, while rustling up some tasty grub with said ingredient to show us all how easy it is. The format reminds me of Hugh’s Fish Fight on Channel 4 earlier this year – is 2011 the year to campaign for your food (a step up from pedestrian food snobbery)?

It’s hard not to like Michel Roux Jr – he’s got French pedigree, he sounds English, he walks about Oxfordshire wheat fields in a smart blazer, and he comes across as someone passionate and relatable when he talks about food. I like the cut of his jib. The best part of his segment on Real Bread is when he visits a bakery under a Hackney railway bridge that uses a 200-year-old starter from Lapland. The finished loaves ‘turn him on’, and you can see why. Mmm.

His three recipes ranged from a simple white loaf (dead easy, but it’ll be a distant future where I dedicate an entire day waiting for dough to rise), a duck pie with bread crust (with a shocking amount of duck fat oozing absolutely everywhere) and a diplomat pudding – that’s posh French bread ‘n’ butter pud in wee little ramekins to you and me. Not exactly recipes I’ll be attempting in my wardrobe-sized kitchen. Lovely to watch and fantasise about.

In contrast to Roux’s savoire faire, you get the bumbling Hairy Bikers duo (it’s the Geordie one and the other one, sorry don’t know their names) espousing all things Brassica. Snowball, purple ones, ‘cheddar-cheese flavoured ones’ (they’re just orange) and my personal favourite, the Romanesco – which looks more like it could be the top of La Sagrada Familia’s towers than in your veg patch. What am I talking about? It’s the cauliflower, of course! Much maligned cousin of the trendy broccoli.

The Bikers’ food style is hearty to say the least, but their three recipes are meant to lure the British family back to buying caulis – cauliflower cheese with mushrooms and bacon, a ‘posh’ cauliflower purée with seared scallops, and an aloo bhaji curry. All ticking the ‘family favourites’ boxes. Guest chef Yotam Ottolenghi (he does sexy, sexy things to vegetables in a modern Middle Eastern style… check out his New Vegetarian column in the Guardian) is invited to do a crowd taste test, and he whips up a grilled cauliflower salad that looks easy, and yet it would never have occurred to me to try it. I would love to see Ottolenghi do a vegetarian food show.

But I digress. Overall the first episode is fun, informative and hasn’t stuck too stringently to a format that stifles each guest’s personalities. By concentrating on a key ingredient it’ll make the aspiring chef at home think differently about the same old veg, or maybe take a little time to try their hand at making bread. Will the campaign work? Well I’ve got a sourdough starter growing in my kitchen, and there’s a snowball in the fridge awaiting its transformation. But then again, I was at the altar from the start.

UPDATE: The Great British Food Revival is airing weekly at 8 p.m. from Wednesday 9 March, on BBC Two.

With such a political chain-yank for a title, Paul Thomas’s and Matt Harlock’s new documentary sets a certain standard for itself. But American: The Bill Hicks Story, besides scene-setting references to “Lyndon Johnson’s great society” and the war in Vietnam, makes no attempt to solder the American experience to a bio of the late American comic. It is a personal history, an effort of oceanic devotion. It threatens to drown its subject.

The form and content of the film are familial. While Hicks’s loved ones tell, in chronological order, the story of his life, we watch reels of photographs from the family album, animated to make every moment improbably and attractively iconic. Hicks, like any publicity-conscious stand-up, was much-snapped. Even as a 16-year-old, he hired a friend, David Johndrow, as his official photographer. Diagnosed with cancer toward the end of the film, he arranges “one last photo shoot”. And in a peculiar anecdote delivered by his mother (one of the film’s ten narrators) Hicks invokes posterity and appears to prophesy the very film you’re watching.

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A quick plug. Over at SF “Let’s Talk Sci-fi” X, I’ve been reviewing Stacey Abbott’s not-very-good The Cult TV Book. My other contributions to this hallowed organ of science fiction, however, are reserved for the print edition – the next issue of which is guest edited by one Terry Pratchett.

First-time director Mo Ali has created a beast.

Shank tries to be a dystopian film that presents a vision of London, circa 2015. Rag, tag and bobtail gangs run the city. So far has the world fallen, they peddle not stolen stereos and drugs but “munchies” – food, in other words (an apple costs £350; a pizza, intriguingly, £85.50). We’re not really told how this came about, and in so short a time too, but no matter: As The Road has shown, people enjoy not being presented with a cause when confronted with apocalyptic effect.

Shank also tries to cross gritty cinema with music video stylistics. Imagine Children of Men and then intersperse it with the credit sequence from The IT Crowd. That’s how Shank watches. For 90 minutes. One minute it’s in fit-like shakycam mode, bouncing through alleyways in chase of hoodlums, the next it’s become a mock-crap computer cartoon of a kid jumping over tower blocks. Quite what that’s supposed to do to you as viewer is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t matter because… Read more »

The nice people at Axiom Films recently sent me a copy of Goodbye Solo (it’s just come out on DVD), so I’m armed with a handy excuse to revisit one of last year’s most acclaimed films.

On its release, Goodbye Solo was received with that gushing sincerity critics reserve for non-obnoxious indie cinema. Ben Walters of Time Out found the film to be “shot through with beauty and humility”; Neil Smith wrote in Total Film that Goodbye Solo was made of “humour, grace and compassion”; Roger Ebert enthused it was “the best film in town“. All very nicey-nicey.

Then someone mentioned Realism and a small blogging war broke out. That someone was A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Grouping Goodbye Solo with its contemporary releases Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain, Scott came to the conclusion that director Ramin Bahrami was leading a Stateside return to Neorealism (yes, that’s right: post-war, black and white, car-headlamp lit, lefty Italian cinema). It was all a gush too far for The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who felt compelled to write an eight-point rebuttal two days before Scott’s piece was even published in print. Scott quickly retreated behind a wall of critical hooey, suggested he and Brody agree to disagree, and everyone went on living as before. Ho-de-hum.

To cut a long introduction short: Goodbye Solo was widely accepted to be a good film, but, save for a few wishywashy adjectives and a self-serving storm-in-a-teablog, no one could really say why. Read more »

Few directors have managed to marry poetry and narrative film in a wholly satisfactory way – the list of noble attempts is a short one. Maybe the truth is that verse, so often to be found arresting time, exists only in stark contrast to film, where the ticking clock is inexorable. There is also a very practical consideration: filming writers in action is rarely dramatically profitable.

But Jane Campion, directing this biopic of John Keats’s last years in Hampstead Village, is unafraid of poetry’s holy moments. The young Romantic’s compositions in this period (1818-21) included ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’, the first parts of Hyperion and his six great odes – astonishingly precocious achievements for any writer, never mind a surgeon’s apprentice in his early 20s, racked with tuberculosis and publicly derided in the Quarterly Review. Sensibly, Campion does not try to crush his greatest hits into 120 minutes of epiphanies on the heath and bouts of furious quill-scratching. Bright Star, named after one of Keats’s sonnets, is about as tender a romance as the author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ deserves. Poetry, discussed throughout, is eventually put into an intractable conflict with love, thanks to the zealous assertions of Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s friend and supporter, who jealously guards his pet genius from the advances of their neighbour, experimental seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). But poetry is not all of Keats, and Keats is not all of Bright Star. Campion’s film rather takes Brawne as its subject, and it’s through her eyes and ears we contend with Keats’s sensory responsiveness and poetic gift.

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Contrary to popular opinion, it’s easy to addict oneself to gritty realist cinema. There’s something moreish about the feeling of slackening one’s mind into a putty-like receptacle, ready to be loaded full of outrage, shock, pity and righteous indignation. And if that doesn’t hook you, at the end of the movie you’re suffused with the warm fuzzy feeling that you earned by relating to people in worlds entirely alien to your own.

On the face of it, Lion’s Den – with its tagline ‘Mother Behind Bars’– looks set to satiate even the staunchest fan of ‘hard-hitting’ film. Julia – an eye-catching, affluent 20-something – is imprisoned for committing a murder of which she has no memory (legal injustice always gets the juices flowing). Being pregnant with the dead man’s child (abandoned, vulnerable mother) she is incarcerated in an all-female ward where inmates can raise their children (the clincher: innocent, criminalised babies).

Director Pablo Trapero has taken this plot – purpose-made, it would seem, for soliciting empathy – and done the unthinkable. He has refused to disguise the impossibility of relating to his subjects. Read more »

Neo-classical avant-gardist Peter Greenaway returns to indie cinemas near you with Nightwatching, a boisterous and beguiling film straight out of cinema’s academic leftfield. Cut from the same canvas as The Draughtsman Contract, Nightwatching sees Greenaway again throw himself into artsy period restoration, this time in chase of answers to the legend that is Rembrandt. The themes of painter as outsider and of cinema as artifice are never far from the camera’s lens, and while onscreen events fail to reprise the full pomp of Greenaway’s yore, Nightwatching certainly proves an edifying spectacle in the current atmosphere of Avatars and Wolfmen.

The film’s beating heart is Rembrandt himself, a painter as technically brilliant as he is historically elusive. For all the acclaim this famed Dutch Master continues to receive in art schools, little is known about his life. Of the three women he took during his lifetime, for example, where the second two came from is anybody’s guess. And then there’s his finances. Rembrandt famously died destitute having once lived handsomely, though just where all the money went remains a mystery. Read more »

Northwest Vision and Media – which funded Salvage (2009) along with two other micro-budget feature films, both premiered in 2008 – has asked me to keep a secret. As budget film benefactors are the undisputed angels of the industry, I’ve decided to play nice and not broadcast the mystery of the shipping container whose contents rampage their way through Salvage’s 180 blood-spattered minutes.

Jodie (Linzey Cocker) plays the Dad-doting teen sent to spend Christmas with her career-bent mother (Neve McIntosh) who is found – true to form – bonking a stranger with the door open. Thus, when the horrors-of-which-we-may-not-speak break out of a shipping container washed up on a nearby beach to terrorise the streets of the cul-de-sac, Mum and her friendly fuck are left peeping out at the house across the road, where Jodie has fled in sulky rebellion.

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