Let’s talk about Ariana Grande’s body. It’s difficult, not least because Ariana, 31, would rather you didn’t. She released a three-minute TikTok last year addressed to fans who were concerned that she was “too thin”. “I think we should be …
Why are we Polanski hypocrites?
This is a tale of censorship. In 2019, Roman Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus Affair, An Officer and a Spy, was nominated for 12 César awards and won the Grand Jury prize at Venice. But, due to #MeToo, it was …
How Fritz Lang invented fantasy
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 …
What incels get wrong about Fight Club
Everyone knows the famous exchange in The Wild One (1953) even if they haven’t seen the movie — a brassy dame in a blonde beehive asking Marlon Brando “What are you rebelling against?”, a slightly pouty-looking Marlon Brando answering, “Whattaya …
Why shouldn’t AI write a film?
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for despatch, in 30 seconds. How can the writers compete with that?” So asks Roald Dahl in his short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, published in 1953.
The eponymous …
Did success ruin Quentin Tarantino?
It was supposed to be the ultimate mic drop. For almost a decade — Quentin Tarantino has been touting his plan to retire after his tenth and final movie, The Movie Critic. It was, he said, “based on a guy …
Can Challengers make sex hot again?
I was the sole audience member at an otherwise-empty afternoon showing of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers this week, which should have been a rare luxury but instead made me feel like a pervert. Challengers is not a sex movie — ostensibly, …
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 …
The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz
The most-told joke about Auschwitz surfaces in different forms. As I first heard it while a teenager in “north London” — not just a cluster of adjacent postcodes, of course, but shorthand for a mindset that one kind of pundit …
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. …
Kidulting is tragic
Kids like pretending to be adults. They give dolls haircuts and make plastic meals in little plastic kitchens. They gawp in wonderment at diggers and bulldozers, then use miniature versions for their own grand construction plans, building imaginary cities where …
Ridley Scott: our Anglo-Saxon Maximus
A decade ago, I rewatched Gladiator in a freezing cold forward-operating base outside Mosul with Kurdish Peshmerga, cocooned in brightly-coloured blankets. When I complained that the sound wasn’t working on the small television, someone replied “Surely you must know every …
How did Oxford become so lame?
When I was 17, the schoolmaster tasked with overseeing my moral development frowned at my show of indecision about the future direction of my education and, as if letting me into a trade secret, carefully explained: “Look, clever people go …
How not to have sex
The Zoomer Generation is notoriously uninterested in the risk-taking behaviours that were once a rite of passage to adulthood. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, and they’re indifferent to sex — not just to having it, but even, according to …
Will Hollywood strike back?
In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first …