Amy-Jane Beer's The Flow is a book about rivers, and particularly the rivers of Great Britain. It's my favourite kind of nature writing, mixing personal memoir with history, science, ecology and culture, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Less enjoyable was Empire of Light, which we went to see last night. From the trailers, I'd expected a nostalgic tribute to the power of cinema, possibly involving the restoration of a derelict building. I was not expecting a violent racist attack, and was definite not expecting a disturbing portrayal of severe mental illness leading to sectioning. I think it was a good film (and the cinematography was stunning) but it really wasn't much fun to watch.

Having come to the conclusion that I've probably read everything I was going to read, I thought I should probably submit my first ever Hugo ballot.

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Unlike the other adaptations of classic novels we've seen recently, Autumn de Wilde's new adaptation of Emma closely follows the plot of the novel. While I know several people who prefer more faithful adaptations of this kind, I often find that in the absence of anything new I am more likely to compare the film unfavourably to the pictures in my head, and in this case I certainly felt that Knightley was entirely wrong: blond instead of dark, scruffy instead of suave, and he looked far too close to Emma in age (though that may just be a sign that I have reached the age where everyone under the age of 40 just looks like a Young Person). That aside, though, it is an incredibly beautiful film; Anya Taylor-Joy's Emma looks like a Botticelli angel and has just the right mix of awfulness and charm, and the sets and costumes are gorgeous. Bill Nighy is fabulous as Mr Woodhouse, and while Miranda Hart is much too tall for Miss Bates she's so perfect in every other way that I'm happy to overlook that. Certainly worth seeing, though I think I preferred both Little Women and The Personal History of David Copperfield.

We booked our tickets for Bong Joon-ho's Parasite before the Oscars last weekend, which was probably just as well as the small screen at the Picturehouse was completely packed. I don't think I know enough about films to say whether it was absolutely the best film of the year, but it's very good. Part black comedy, part thriller, part social commentary, it tells the story of the Kim family, who live in a semi-basement in the slums of Seoul, scraping a living on cash-in-hand jobs and using other people's wifi to connect to the outside world, as they inveigle their way into jobs in the home of the wealthy Parks. It's funny, thought-provoking and original, and definitely worth watching.

For someone with a degree in English literature, I have read very little Dickens (A Christmas Carol, obviously; A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations; Bleak House) and apart from a passionate admiration for Sydney Carton's heroic redemption which means I still know quite a lot of that final chapter by heart, I've never been a huge fan. This meant that, while I knew the names of a lot of the characters in David Copperfield, in the way the names of Dickens characters so often do seem terribly familiar despite being entirely divorced from context, I went into Armando Ianucci's new film version with absolutely no idea of the actual plot of the novel. (Checking Wikipedia, this may have been a good thing, as it appears that Ianucci has done a lot of adapting, conflating two separate school episodes into one, reordering events and changing the fates of some characters.)

The film stars Dev Patel as David Copperfield, heading an admirably diverse cast which also includes Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton. Condensing the novel down to under two hours means the plot rattles along at a cracking pace, and while it also means that there's no time for the huge cast of characters to become anything but caricatures, well, this is Dickens, so they probably wouldn't have managed it even if this had been an epic TV series rather than a film. Visually, it's rather lovely in a Tourist Board kind of way, all sunshine and rolling green fields and very clean CGI historical streets. I felt that it did rather underplay the episodes of misery and deprivation in David's life and came across as much more of a cheerful romp than any kind of social commentary, but it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours escaping reality on a January evening.

Our last cinema trip of the year was to see Greta Gerwig's new adaptation of Little Women. I have to confess to a certain amount of trepidation about this one; I have loved Little Women for nearly 40 years, though I haven't dared to re-read it in adulthood in case it turns out to have been visited by the Suck Fairy (I did read one of Alcott's other novels a few years ago, and found it quite uncomfortably moralistic), and I have generally been disappointed by adaptations (I don't think I even made it to the end of episode 1 of the TV adaptation that was on a couple of years ago). However, I really liked Gerwig's directorial debut, Lady Bird, and the reviews for Little Women were generally very good, so we gave it a try.

As it turned out, I loved Gerwig's interpretation of the story. One of my worries, going with T who has never read the book, was that the adaptation might feel twee, hackneyed or mawkish; Gerwig's choice to tell the story out of order, using the second half of part 2 (the part sometimes published separately as Good Wives, though I always knew them as two halves oft the same book) as a frame with the earlier story told in flashback made it feel fresh and new, and I appreciated the stylistic choice that coloured the "past" scenes with a golden tinge and the "present" with a harsher, bluer light. All of the familiar, beloved scenes from the first half of the novel are there - 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents*', Jo singeing Meg's hair and meeting Laurie at the party, Amy burning Jo's manuscript and then falling through the ice, Meg giving in to vanity at her Vanity Fair - but the main focus of the film is the story of the sisters' later lives, in particular Jo's and Amy's (Meg seems to have less screen time, by comparison, and poor Beth's story is necessarily limited). I'm much less familiar with this part of the novel; I'm sure I have read it just as often as the beginning, but it didn't engage my attention as a child, and hasn't stayed with me in the same way, so I very much enjoyed seeing it on screen. (And maybe I will actually re-read the book soon.)

Saoirse Ronan is very good as Jo, though possibly a bit too pretty and dainty; I kept failing to recognise Emma Watson as Meg, but for me the stand-out performance among the sisters was Florence Pugh as Amy, managing to bring real depth to a character I'd always dismissed as shallow and annoying. (I'm also amused that two of the four March sisters were brought up in Oxford.) Meryl Streep also does a terrifically acerbic Aunt March. And, as a knitter I couldn't help noticing some fabulous shawls (mostly triangular shawls worn crossed over the bust and tied in the back - and I see that Beth's at least is on Ravelry) and at least one really nice pair of colourwork mittens.

All in all, I thought this was a fantastic adaption, though I do wish I'd thought to take extra tissues - I haven't cried so much at a film since I, Daniel Blake!

* which I gather that Clare Balding, on Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire, confidently declared to be the opening line of Middlemarch

La Belle Époque is an entertaining French romcom starring Daniel Auteuil as depressed, out-of-work cartoonist Victor. Uncomfortable with modern technology and mourning the deterioration of his marriage, he takes up the offer of a 'time travel experience' (actually a re-creation facilitated by Antoine, a friend of his son's who owes him a debt of gratitude) to return to 1974, spend time in a bar he used to frequent and re-create his first meeting with his wife Marianne. I was a little worried that it was going to be a film about an older man having an affair with an inappropriately younger woman, but happily that turned out not to be the case. In fact, it's a double romcom; as well as Victor's relationship with Marianne (the always-excellent Fanny Ardant) we follow the tempestuous relationship between Antoine and Margot, the actress playing the young Marianne in the recreation. I found it funny (the scenes of the other recreations being provided by Antoine's company are brilliant), heartwarming and charming.

The Good Liar stars Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren as Roy and Betty, two people of a certain age who meet via an online dating site. It's clear from the start that Roy isn't what he appears to be at all; instead, he's a conman, involved in a variety of shady schemes and with a sideline in scamming wealthy widows out of their savings, and he's lined Betty up as his next victim, despite the obvious opposition of her only relative, her grandson Stephen.

The thriller plot zips along nicely, and while some of the twists seemed a bit obvious there were certainly some surprises. In any case, the main attraction of the film isn't the plot; it's the opportunity to watch McKellen chewing every piece of scenery in sight and Mirren being a total badass, and it delivers both in spades. It's not the most memorable of films, but it was an entertaining diversion for a soggy November evening in what is proving to be a really tough week.

(Content note, however: there is one scene depicting fairly graphic sexual violence involving a child.)

The Farewell, the new film from Chinese-American director Lulu Wang, is a semi-autobiographical study of family relationships and the emigrant experience. It's told from the point of view of Billi, an aspiring Chinese-American writer living in New York. When Billi's grandmother, Nai Nai, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, her family make the decision not to tell her about the diagnosis; instead, they plan a wedding for Billi's cousin Hao Hao and his girlfriend of three months in order to have a pretext for one last family gathering, with Billi's family returning from the USA and Hao Hao's from Japan for the celebration.

This is a funny, touching and thought-provoking film, looking at what family means when parents and siblings can be separated by thousands of miles and go years without seeing each other. It's beautifully shot, too, with a gorgeous piano-led soundtrack, and Awkwafina's performance as Billi, struggling with the family decision to withhold the truth about Nai Nai's diagnosis from her and with the distance from her childhood memories of China, is terrific. We nearly missed this, as the Picturehouse website has been updated and the new listings are an absolute disaster; it's now impossible to see more than one day's listings at a time, and much harder to scroll through the wall-to-wall screenings of Downton Abbey to find anything more interesting, and The Farewell was only on a couple of times, slightly earlier than our ideal 6:15 slot, but I'm glad we managed to get to see it as it's very good.

After an uninspiring few weeks at the cinema, tonight we went to see the other music-based British film branded as "the feel-good hit of the year!" on the sides of buses. Unlike Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle's sunny seaside Beatlemania froth, Gurinder Chada's new film, Blinded by the Light felt like it had some substance to it. Along with, obviously, some of the greatest songs ever written.

Blinded by the Light is based on a memoir by journalist and Springsteen obsessive Sarfraz Manzoor, and tells the story of 17-year-old Javed, an aspiring writer who despairs of ever getting away from his Luton home. It's set against a background of the racial tensions and unemployment of late-80s Britain (the National Front march through Luton, and Javed's father is made redundant following swingeing cutbacks at the Vauxhall works), while at home Javed's traditionalist father refuses to countenance his son's moving away for university or even going to a party hosted by the neighbour he's been friends with all his life. Frustrated and despairing, having to lie about studying English for A-level instead of Economics, Javed's life changes when he listens to the Bruce Springsteen tapes a friend at sixth form college has lent his, and he hears his own life in the Boss's lyrics.

I loved how perfectly the film evoked what it was like to be a teenager in the 80s. There are so many elements that remind me how my past looked, from the blocky cars to the silk scarves Javed's girlfriend Eliza wears tied in a big bow round her hair (I had so many of those scarves!) to the Parker rollerball Javed writes with (I had a Parker rollerball. Did you have a Parker rollerball? If you were a teenager in the UK in the late 1980s, you quite possibly did). And more than that, I loved how it evoked what it was like to listen to the music that spoke to your soul; to put your headphones on, press play on your Walkman (or cheaper own-brand alternative), slide the volume to high and feel like the whole world was a music video unfolding around you. The film does this brilliantly through the use of quasi-fantasy sequences where the people around Javed join in dancing along with him; it could be cheesy and awkward, but for me it came down on the right side of that. There were lots of pop-culture in-jokes which raised laughs among the audiece (Michael Fish's 'A woman phoned the BBC to say there was a hurricane on the way...' and Javed's father's response to finally listening to Springsteen were the biggest ones), and while absolutely not romanticising either the 80s or Luton and not skirting the very real issue of racism, then and now, there are also a lot of moments where people are shown to be kinder and more generous than first appearances might have led us to believe. I definitely recommend this, even if you don't like Springsteen, though obviously it's even better if you do like the songs.