The Passion of Bess McNeill
Lars von Trier’s harrowing but resplendent story of suffering and grace turns thirty this year.
Charlotte Allen
· 21 min read
Cinema
A collection of 140 posts
A Beautiful Odyssey, Made Dreary By Remorse
Christopher Nolan’s creation is a big movie in every technical sense. But inside, it is diminished and faded: heroes who aren’t allowed to be heroes and gods who aren’t allowed to be gods.
Charlotte Allen
· 14 min read
The Grift at the Gate
The Grift Industrial Complex targeted Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey—and got buried.
Giancarlo Sopo
· 8 min read
The Oldest Tradition in Art
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX cameras, is the newest chapter in an old story: technological innovation creating new forms of art.
Claire Lehmann
· 7 min read
Strong Opinions
When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience.
Stephen Akey
· 10 min read
The Truth Does Not Belong to Eight Billion People
Total disclosure, as Spielberg imagines it, is a beautiful thing to watch. It is also a fantasy.
Yaniv Regev
· 6 min read
Dangerous Liaisons and the #MeToo Wars
Nearly 250 years on, Laclos’s novel of seduction and treachery continues to scandalise.
Cathy Young
· 21 min read
Homeric Heresies
Outrage over a black Helen of Troy misunderstands the long Western tradition of radically reinventing classical myths.
Cathy Young
· 11 min read
Staring at the Sea
It would be very difficult to make a great film from a source as flawed as Camus’s novel, but Ozon has managed to make a very good one.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 19 min read
Infinite Ingenuity: Andy Weir’s Optimistic Vision in ‘Project Hail Mary’
The new film 'Project Hail Mary' based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel, celebrates scientific problem-solving on a cosmic scale. There are striking parallels with David Deutsch's radical optimism.
Iona Italia
· 14 min read
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
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
· 7 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