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  Messing around with the natural order of things causes, uh… chaos… again in the first sequel in a long time to bring back Laura Dern , Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil to join Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt —uniting the first films and the more modern ones. The move from Dinosaurs as an attraction to Dinosaurs as a fact of everyone’s life is not —let’s be clear—the same as a global pandemic caused by poor food hygiene standards at a meat market in China. And a plague of locusts isn’t just the stuff of Biblical epics. Somehow between two ideas the film-makers have come up with an enhanced riff on the notion that if you mess around with nature it will come back and bite you. But if you’re in charge of a big biotech company you probably think you’ll get through it but you will end up in deep spit. The evil business continues from the previous film. Lewis Dodgson ( Campbell Scott ) is the white-haired BioSyn CEO who says how great his company is for people, but there’s a scand...

  If you didn’t ‘do’ To Kill A Mockingbird at school then it remains the one classic novel of the Twentieth Century that you can enjoy on your own terms. It’s a book with some remarkably vivid depictions of Alabama from the memory of Harper Lee, who based the heroic lawyer Atticus Finch on her own father, and who told the story from the point of three kids: Scout and Jem, Atticus’s children—and their friend Dill who is based on Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote. The book was revered and the film starring Gregory Peck is one of the best cinematic adaptations of a novel. Nothing else came from the pen of Harper Lee and she didn’t say much more about it. However when she died there was an unseemly rush to release the work that Lee had originally presented: a memoir of Jean-Louise “Scout” Finch going back to her childhood home. It turned out that To Kill A Mockingbird had been taken from this work and that’s the novel. The ‘sequel’— Go Set A Watchman —had something going for it: mo...