Rohmer at Camelot
Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) vividly recreates the imaginative world in which the people of the Middle Ages lived inside their heads.
Charlotte Allen
· 22 min read
Cinema
A collection of 121 posts
Love and Theft
Luc Besson’s romantic adaptation of the Dracula story owes an unacknowledged debt to Eiko Ishioka, the visionary designer of Francis Cord Coppola’s 1992 classic.
Yuki Zeman
· 11 min read
James Cameron Goes Native
‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is a Rousseau-esque oikophobic fantasy of evil humans and noble savage aliens.
William Barker
· 8 min read
Out on the Wily, Windy Moors...
Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story.
Charlotte Allen
· 20 min read
The End of the Middlebrow Movie
Middlebrow movies weren’t just two-hour escape pods, they functioned as a civic glue, a source of shared language, cross-generational references, and indeed, contemporary American myth.
Harrison Kass
· 7 min read
Why We Still Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece ‘Dr Strangelove’ remains a potent allegory for our times.
William Barker
· 9 min read
Shakespeare in Love and Grief
It appears that people now find comfort in the idea that the life of even the greatest of writers is no more satisfying than their own.
Mallory Young
· 10 min read
Strange Delight
Radley Metzger’s 1975 hardcore adaptation of a celebrated literary hoax is a vast improvement on the cynical source material.
Marilyn Simon
· 15 min read
AI and the End of Common Culture
Culture is fragmented; it is about to become atomised.
Samuel Fitoussi
· 6 min read
The Gospel According to Pasolini
Pasolini's 1964 film reimagines the gospels as fundamentally Jewish stories.
Robert Huddleston
· 8 min read
Cynicism and Cigarettes
Richard Linklater’s film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘À Bout de Souffle’ is a delight.
Charlotte Allen
· 17 min read
The Jewel in the Crown
‘The Man Who Would Be King’ turns fifty.
Graham Daseler
· 21 min read
Holding Out for a Hero
From Achilles to Anakin Skywalker, the messiah myth has evolved from religious prophecy to cautionary tale.
Stewart Slater
· 12 min read
The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer
Susan Sontag’s 1974 essay about Leni Riefenstahl and fascist aesthetics displayed the critic at her most stiflingly moralistic and aristocratic.
Annalisa Zox-Weaver
· 25 min read
Out of the Past
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Graham Daseler
· 11 min read