Cinema Essentials

It's the end of another year, and so time for the almost traditional Cinema Essentials annual review. Records held at the British Museum show that our first annual review took place in 1856, in celebration of the end of the Crimean War. Unfortunately, we were still waiting for someone to invent moving pictures, so there wasn't that much to write about. Type after me: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ..." An Amazing Post You May Have Missed We attempted to change to a new email subscription service this year, but it didn't quite work out, so we've had to change back again for the time being. As a result, you may have missed the post on Stanley Kubrick's  The Killing  during the change over, so I'll just mention that now. 

Sci-fi comedy  Red Dwarf returned for its eighth season in 1999. Not always content just to leave things as they are, co-creator Doug Naylor oversaw another major overhaul for this series, Red Dwarf 's last on the BBC. After the single camera experiment of the previous series,  Red Dwarf VIII  sees the show return to the traditional sitcom format of multiple camera studio filming with a live audience. This series sees Lister (Craig Charles), Cat (Danny John-Jules), Kryten (Robert Llewellyn) and Kochanski (Chloë Annett) all return. But it also sees the unexpected return - without much fanfare - of Chris Barrie as Rimmer. Barrie had apparently enjoyed making  Red Dwarf VII  so much that he was persuaded to come back for a full series. Something else returning this time is the mining ship  Red Dwarf  itself, along with its entire crew - the ship having been recreated and the crew brought back to life by the nanobots used to restore Lister's arm at the end of the last series. So t

The sci-fi comedy series  Red Dwarf  hit a peak with its new format from the third season onwards. That season saw the series action move from its former base on the mining ship  Red Dwarf  itself to the smaller shuttle craft  Starbug . It retained the three main characters of Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Lister (Craig Charles) and the Cat (Danny John-Jules), but replaced Norman Lovett as the ship's computer Holly with Hattie Hayridge in the same role, and introduced a significant new crew member in the android Kryten (Robert Llewellyn). While Holly disappeared after Red Dwarf V in 1992, the rest of the cast was unchanged until the seventh season in 1997. Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), Lister (Craig Charles) and Rimmer (Chris Barrie) in "Blue" The sixth season, Red Dwarf VI , had ended in 1993 on a cliffhanger, and it would be more than three years until the show's fans would get to see the resolution to that storyline (such as it was) and the revamped  Red Dwarf  that would