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
Cinema
A collection of 136 posts
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
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