Towards the end of the 1970s, Spielberg began working on a sequel to “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”. Unlike its predecessor, which spun alien visitation as a hopeful, transcendent and optimistic event, this follow-up would take a much darker tone: a story of a family in a rural farmhouse being terrorised by a group of aliens. “Night Skies”, as it was called, never went in front of the…

Posted as part of Realweegiemidget‘s Adoring Angela Lansbury Blogathon

Far better than the “Mary Poppins”-lite it’s often dismissed as, “Bedknobs And Broomsticks” takes the more famous nanny’s Disnified spoonful of sugar and stirs it into a shot of absinthe before knocking it back in one go and heading off to war.

A curious and yet intoxicating mixture of Disney tweeness and stiff-upper-lipped…