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 …
How fame corrupted Alan Rickman
“Arwen Holm phones,” writes Alan Rickman, “to tell me of a nasty little piece in the Telegraph saying how unsmiling I was in the local deli.” This is from his diaries Madly, Deeply, which are published posthumously — he died …
American Gigolo is no longer sexy
Julian Kay is a thrillingly charming escort, as comfortable at international art auctions as he is on the pull-up bar. His speciality is older women, and when one asks him, in one of those old hotel restaurant booths so cushioned …
Why artists sell out
“I’m not green-lighting anything I don’t understand,” says Barry Lapidus, a studio executive at Paramount Pictures. “We’re going to stop developing these rarefied flights of fancy and start applying some good business sense to what we do here.”
This dialogue …
The many failures of Ben Affleck
It is now generally agreed that there is something grubby about enjoying paparazzi photographs, especially when the subject has mental health issues. But there appears to be an exception for Ben Affleck. A few years ago, when the actor was …
Has Thor destroyed Marvel?
There’s a 2005 episode of Doctor Who in which David Tennant’s Doctor turns against Prime Minister Harriet Jones and undermines her with six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” Veiled as concern, it’s barely a criticism at all but …
Pro-porn feminists can’t tell the truth
Should porn be banned? The question would have seemed a perfectly reasonable one during the post-1968 “Porn Wars”, when prominent feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon drafted anti-pornography ordinances that passed in major cities — before being struck …
How we gave up on the future
Once upon a time, a teenager called Sarah was looking for a Father’s Day present for her dad, Jim. For hours she scoured the bazaars of St Albans, but none had quite what she wanted. The sunshine began to fade, …
Dr Strange and the perils of the multiverse
This is a story about choices and consequences, so let’s start with DC’s decision in 1961 to publish a landmark issue of The Flash called “Flash of Two Worlds!” In the story, created by Gardner Fox and Carmen Infantino, the …