“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 …
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 curse of the Hollywood remake
When it comes to the Hollywood remake, far too many travesties have been foisted upon us over the years, either in the service of Mammon or in emulation of Icarus. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes (2001) was a tedious …
Ingmar Bergman’s moral horror show
It’s not exactly headline news if I insist that the Swedish auteur, Ingmar Bergman, was one of the very greatest filmmakers of all time, but when I immersed myself in his films while living alone last winter, they hit me …
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 …
Tár and the triumph of amoral artists
“Once I saw it, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian…”
Tár, Todd Field’s new film about an eminent female conductor, is splitting the musical crowd. …
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 …
