It’s one of the sad facts of our miserable climate of miserable prognostications about the state of the cinema that it continually obscures a simple truth: movies are very young. Compared to most artforms, the cinema is still in its …
Why we need genocide cinema
“I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” said Jonathan Glazer about his film, The Zone of Interest, which offers a chillingly clinical, fly-on-the-wall view of the Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, and his family as they go about their …
Gay cinema is too boring
When I was a teenager, films about gay men came in two varieties: BFI gay films and Canal+ gay films. BFI gay films were worthy classics from the Seventies and Eighties. Jarman. Fassbinder. Pasolini, if you felt up to it. …
Is the Marvel Universe about to implode?
Even for this recovering comic-book fan who left the community two decades ago, it’s impossible to escape the Marvel Comic Universe. Reinforced by quippy banter, diversity-by-quota casting and passable CGI, its money-making “formula” has conquered the world. The strategy is …
America’s pop-culture armageddon
When the great American critic HL Mencken wrote his great essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” in 1917, lamenting the absence of high-level American minds equal to those of Europe, especially in the South, he badly missed the mark. America …
The empty cult of The Big Lebowski
The incipient cult of The Big Lebowski was forming before I even saw the movie, and I saw it fairly early on, two or three weeks after its release. I didn’t recognise the signs at the time, but they were …
Steven Spielberg’s childish fantasy
The Fabelmans (man of stories), which is nominated for seven Academy Awards, is not the first film Steven Spielberg made about himself. All his films have elements of memoir: the lonely child, the punished mother, the lost father. Even Schindler’s …
Quentin Tarantino meets Bret Easton Ellis
For all their originality, Quentin Tarantino’s films have always been rooted in the Hollywood of his youth, pastiching and repurposing his earliest influences. Now, in his first work of non-fiction, Cinema Speculation, Tarantino returns to his influences, exploring the Seventies …
How Hollywood destroyed Michael Cimino
Of all the downfalls in Hollywood history, Michael Cimino’s haunts me the most, destroyed by his artistic ambitions in a corporate town whose rules he didn’t want to play by. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich may come close, but they …
How Hollywood destroyed Michael Cimino
Of all the downfalls in Hollywood history, Michael Cimino’s haunts me the most, destroyed by his artistic ambitions in a corporate town whose rules he didn’t want to play by. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich may come close, but they …
Batman won’t save us
“This movie will go back to Batman’s roots,” said the journalist. “Mysterious, brooding, dark, sombre.” “I wanted to make the definitive, dark, serious version of Batman,” said the producer. “We live in very dark times,” said the comic-book writer. “It …