250,000 miles from home, the hardest thing you have to face… is yourself. The time has come again to review and promote another obscure but excellent movie. Moon is a science fiction drama film directed by Duncan Jones, another director who made one fabulous movie and then unfortunately did nothing else. In the year 2035 humans have had a brilliantly innovative and significant idea of mining helium-3 on the Moon to solve the oil crisis on Earth. One man – or so it seems – has been sent by Lunar Industries to oversee the whole process for three years with an artificial intelligence called GERTY as his only companion. The main drama of the film begins when Sam Bell, the overseer of the mining project, crashes his moon rover and falls unconscious. Sam later awakes in the infirmary of his moon base with no memory of the accident, but when he hears GERTY receiving instructions from Lunar Industries to stop him leaving the base, his suspicions are aroused. Sam creates a fake problem to force GERTY to allow him to leave the base and travels to the site of the crashed rover… where he finds himself, unconscious. Despite having “borrowed” some elements from The Matrix – elements which I will refrain from revealing here so as not to spoil the movie – the plot still manages to seem quite original. In my opinion, it is almost a greater achievement for a movie to take ideas from another movie and yet retain significant originality than for a movie to create totally new, innovative ideas. Although we’ll never really know what new ideas are going to come until they’ve appeared, I feel we are in a stage where most of the genius of the world, in terms...

It was a Tuesday. You know the type. Gloomy, overcast, on the point of rain. It often rained. Depressing for most people. As if the Great Depression wasn’t depressing enough already. Business wasn’t good. There are, of course, ups and downs with everything (we are currently in the middle of a spectacular down in the American economy) and ‘Mallory’s Detective Agency’ – which, unfortunately, was comprised of only one detective – was no different. Despite my best efforts, it wasn’t very well known, tucked away on the upper floors of a deteriorating building, at the corner of an old block on a shady side-street. Every single client of mine, without fail, had remarked upon entry – with slightly different wording each time – that it was ‘a perfect location for a detective agency, right in the middle of all the criminals.’ They always sounded amused when they said it, as if they were telling a joke that they were particularly fond of. I always pretended to laugh. When one hears something that was once funny eighty-seven times, one rarely still finds it funny. And, anyway, it wasn’t funny to begin with. I stared at the door. It was eleven o’clock. No client had arrived through that door yet. I took out my lighter and cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lit it. I started to smoke and stared at the door again. It still wasn’t opening. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the ash on my ashtray was quite disorganized. I absentmindedly tidied it into a neat pyramidal heap. It was then that the door opened. The head, the bulging eyes and the remarkably lengthy neck of my secretary, Miss White, made a very welcome appearance. ‘A Mister Floyd to see...

Sooner or later they will find you. This film is, rather surprisingly, not very well-known. I was inspired to write a review of the film and promote it a little more after I was persistently struck by the fact that nobody had a clue what I was talking about when I recommended The Others. In each case, the disappointment and vague humiliation was such that I did not persevere with pointing out the excellent attributes of the movie, but afterwards I always regretted that. Cloud of Think, however, provides me with a fantastic opportunity to peacefully detail its magnificence without anybody cutting me short and saying, ‘I’ve never heard of that.’ Therefore, this review of The Others will probably be only the first in a series of reviews of obscure but excellent movies. The Others is a psychological horror film written by Alejandro Amenábar. It is about the only noteworthy thing that he has ever done. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Grace Stewart (played by Nicole Kidman), a devout Roman Catholic, lives in a remote country mansion with her two children. Both children suffer from the uncommon disease of xeroderma pigmentosum, characterised by photosensitivity, and so the trio’s lives are structured around a set of rules to ensure they are never directly exposed to sunlight. The arrival of three new servants to the house (the previous servants disappeared one day without warning) coincides with a series of strange incidents, which grow steadily more sinister throughout the movie – a piano is heard but there is nobody playing it, an impenetrable fog lies around the grounds of the mansion at all times, and Grace’s daughter sketches a mysterious family which she claims to have seen in the house. As the film progresses,...