Category: Film
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Do the Right Thing: Jane Elliott Against the World
Nearly sixty years after she devised a classroom exercise that forced white American children to confront racial discrimination, Jane Elliott is still fighting. Judd Ehrlich’s remarkable documentary examines the experiences that shaped her convictions, the price paid by her family and the determination of a ninety-two-year-old educator who refuses to be silenced. Years before Jane…
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The Coming of Age Film — Girls
Growing up female is a different experience from growing up male, and the cinema that tells the truth about it is a different cinema — not because women are a special category requiring separate treatment, but because the world treats them differently, because the forces that shape a girl’s becoming are not the forces that…
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Richard Avedon: The Beauty and the Reckoning
Ron Howard’s new Netflix documentary revisits one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers, whose images transformed fashion, celebrity and portraiture. With unprecedented access to his archives, the film explores a man whose fascination with beauty was matched by an equally powerful curiosity about human vulnerability. In 1955, Richard Avedon photographed the model Dovima standing…
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The Coming of Age Film – Boys
The coming of age film is cinema’s most personal genre and its most dishonest one, and the dishonesty runs in a specific direction: it tells us that growing up is a journey with a destination, that the confusion and the pain and the loss of childhood have a purpose, that the person who emerges from…
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Tinto Brass (1933–2026): The Politics of Looking
The Italian filmmaker, who died on 4 November aged 93, became internationally notorious for his erotic cinema. Yet his career began among the experimental filmmakers of the 1960s, when questions of artistic freedom, political authority and the possibilities of the moving image occupied his work. His legacy is considerably more complicated than his reputation suggests.…
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Patrick Stewart (1940–2026): We Are Not Here to Have Fun
Remembering the Shakespearean actor, lifelong socialist and irreverent friend whose finest lines were often delivered away from the stage. In Sean Mathias’s 2009 production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Patrick Stewart played Vladimir opposite Ian McKellen’s Estragon. When the two characters were reunited, Stewart performed a little shimmy. The…
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YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING: NATHAN FIELDER AND THE ART OF DECEPTION
In one of the most audacious documentaries of recent years, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim move into the home of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, thirty-four days before she enters prison. What follows is a bewildering confrontation between two people whose careers have depended, in very different ways, upon manipulating appearances. Part psychological thriller, part…
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DIGGER: TOM CRUISE, THE APOCALYPSE AND THE TERRIBLE COMFORT OF BEING RIGHT
In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s audacious new film, Tom Cruise abandons the reassuring heroism of his action career to play a grotesque billionaire whose reckless pursuit of wealth threatens to destroy civilisation. But Digger is considerably more than an environmental satire. Beneath its theatrical excess lies a devastating examination of capitalism, celebrity, political impotence and the…
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The Reel Argument: Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi made films about women being destroyed by the world, and he made them with a camera that moves like a conscience — slowly, continuously, unable to look away. He is the greatest filmmaker Japan has produced on the subject of female suffering, which is to say he is the greatest filmmaker Japan has…
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Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything
Saul Bass did not invent the film title sequence. He did something more consequential: he convinced Hollywood that the audience’s first minute and a half was not dead time to be tolerated but a work of art to be made. Everything that followed — in cinema, in corporate identity, in the visual culture of the…
