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Humanity, compassion….Art

Tweet Biutiful – Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu Innaritu celebrates our humanity more powerfully than any contemporary Director. But his social, political and personal emotional landscape is implacable; often, true to the lives of many, starkly bleak. He puts in what is missing from most movies: the salutary reality that our aspiration to the good, our struggle […]

Passion and love; friendship and respect; philosophy and humanity

Tweet Stars Hankies My Afternoons With Margueritte – Jean Becker Rumpelstiltskinian: Director Becker has taken a few random narrative straws and spun them into a fragment of gold. Sentimental? Yes: but touching, truthful and with that rare quality in modern movies, heart. Semi-literate Germain Chazes (a superb Depardieu) was the unwanted result of a post-prandial […]

The Time of our lives at the movies

TweetThe Clock – Christian Marclay – White Cube Gallery London Not a movie but deeply cinematic. This Art installation at the White Cube Gallery, Mason’s Yard is a must for anyone interested in cinema. But be warned it is onnly on until 13th November Californian Christian Marclay has taken clips from thousands of commercial films […]

Music unites what words divide

Tweet The Soloist – Joe Wright Why do we go to the movies? I guess for as many different reasons as there are different kinds of films: to be entertained, informed, moved; to be made to laugh or cry, or exceptionally, both at the same time; or more rarely to be challenged, stimulated, provoked into […]

Dawn of the forlorn Prawn

Tweet District 9 – Neill Blomkamp The science is risible: the fiction banal. District 9 is a good B movie with pretensions; and like all good B movies, it rattles along at a pace fast enough for you to almost forgive the cheap n’ cheerful costumes, make-up, special effects and frequently clunky dialogue. A docu-drama, […]

Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s bleak but masterful vision

Tweet Antichrist – Lars von Trier Wittgenstein said he always found Freud worth reading – for thought-provoking psychological ideas. He expressed no interest in Freud’s work as the basis for a therapeutic regime. As ever, this is both clear thinking and wise. In Antichrist, Lars von Trier tempts us to become as entangled in Freudian […]

Il Divo – the extraordinary life of Giulio Andreotti* – an essay

Tweet Il Divo – Paolo Sorrentino (2008) Shakespearean in content, operatic in tone, writer director Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (the extraordinary life of Giulio Andreotti) is a masterly work. Richly textured and at times demanding, Sorrentino’s film is a profound study of power, and its irresistible affects on men who possess it and those drawn […]

Aw c’mon guys, gimme an Oscar

Tweet Is Anybody There? – John Cowley Is there a nation on earth more contemptuous or contemptible about the old than the British? Politically and socially we under-resource shamefully large numbers of the elderly literally to the point of starvation; or we freeze them to death. Politicians with a toxic self-serving sentimentality exploit them. We […]

The Apprentice Week 5 – Parrots, Pirates and Pants

Tweet The Apprentice Week 5 – Parrots, Pirates and Pants The penny finally drops: when deciding who to take into the boardroom, the losing team leader must ignore task performance, personal animosity one or two-way, disruptiveness, charmlessness and most especially the unshakable solipsistic egoism shared by all the apprentice Apprentices. No: the implacable rule is […]

The Apprentice Week 4 – ‘Sh*t of the Show’ winner

Tweet The Apprentice Week 4 – ‘Sh*t of the Show’ winner – with still 8 shows to go. Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram July 1961: “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental […]