Into the Woods

(seen 19 January 2015)

The Disney film of Stephen Sondheim's musical 'Into the Woods' stars Meryl Streep, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Johnny Depp and many others. It simplifies the plot of the original play (fewer characters and fewer deaths) but remains true to the spirit of retelling some well known tales from the Brothers Grimm - 'Little Red Riding Hood', 'Jack and the Beanstalk', 'Cinderella' and 'Rapunzel' - intertwining them into a meditation on growing up, facing responsibility and attempting to make moral choices in a complicated world.

Testament of Youth

(seen in preview 12 January 2015)

The film, based on Vera Brittain's book of the same name, concerns the author's experiences as a young woman who succeeds, much against family pressure, in gaining a place at Oxford University in 1914, but who during the course of the First World War leaves her studies to become a nurse. It stars Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain, Kit Harington as her fiance Roland Leighton, Taron Egerton as her brother Edward, and Colin Morgan as Victor Richardson.

The Theory of Everything

(seen 2 January 2015)

The film, based on Jane Hawking's second book about her life with Stephen Hawking, portrays their relationship from their first meeting as undergraduates in the early 1960s to his investiture as Companion of Honour some twenty-five years later, by which time they had married, brought up three children, and separated.

The salient points about Stephen are his brilliance as a scientist and the long affliction of motor neuron disease, with which he has now lived for 50 years, though it was expected that he would survive only about two years from the time of the diagnosis in 1963. But the film is not a biopic of a disabled genius; it is rather a portrait of a very strong, remarkable yet inevitably troubled marriage which did not survive the strain of all that happened.