Arts Reviews

Recently, Kate Bush went to the top of the iTunes charts — yes, such a thing does still exist — with her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill." It’s an excellent song, one of her finest works, but the reason for its somewhat unexpected resurgence in popularity is because it was prominently featured in the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. It's testament to the show’s continued popularity that its consistent, even ruthless channeling of Eighties nostalgia can lead to unexpected knock-on effects.

Streaming services have a school violence problem. For all the hand-wringing and anti-gun stances actors love to indulge on social media, their industry has no problem glorifying the very terror they claim to condemn. Two such cases came last week, right after the Uvalde school shooting that left twenty-one people dead, nineteen of which were schoolchildren. On Friday May 27, three days after Uvalde, the fourth season of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix with an opening scene of mass child death, apparently at the hands of the show’s protagonist, Eleven, in a flashback. Several kids' corpses lie on the floor with smears and pools of blood around them. The streaming service added a disclaimer at the beginning of the season specifically referencing the incident in Texas.

Quick Top Gun II: Maverick movie synopsis (and spoiler alert) by the Bad Guys: let's build a secret base using the Star Wars Death Star plans. We'll leave an air vent that looks like a giant bullseye where one bomb will take down the whole place. Good Guys movie synopsis: to make it a fair fight, instead of one Navy Seal throwing a grenade down that ventilation shaft, we'll come up with a near impossible plan involving multiple airplanes flown by irascible characters. Should kill the whole two hours. It seems like some sort of anti-union move to credit people with the screenwriting for this movie.

Ricky Gervais has caused a stir. This is not, perhaps, the least expected thing you could hear about the sixty-year-old British comedian, but his new Netflix show, SuperNature, has attracted an unusual amount of opprobrium for what people have perceived as anti-trans jokes. In the show, Gervais makes a distinction between “the old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs” and “the new women... with beards and cocks.” He calls upon the latter to “lose the cock,” and the audience laughs along with him hysterically.

The Cannes Film Festival remains the most glamorous and famous gathering of the movie industry in the world. High-profile, black-tie premieres attended by some of the best-known actors jostle alongside the more disreputable commercial market. Films on sale this year include My Neighbor Adolf, about the unlikely friendship that is struck up between a Holocaust survivor and a mysterious man who may or may not be Adolf Hitler. But back in the main festival, everything is going entirely to plan. Apparently. There has not been a “normal” Cannes Film Festival since 2019. The 2020 edition was canceled, and the 2021 event took place in reduced and rather glum circumstances in July. But now Cannes is back, back, back, bébé!

New York’s Upper East Side — 1018 Madison Avenue, to be exact — currently hosts another world at the Gray Gallery. It’s a universe with a near-scientific attention to detail. Plant stems are bisected and, in turn, bisect paintings like winding snakes; petals and branches are painted in such microscopic detail that they appear like the surface of some far-flung planet; and canvases are awash with such bright, clean lines they seem almost like subway maps of a particularly topsy-turvy city. The works — pastels, oil on canvas, and oil on linen — are those of Evelyn Statsinger (1927 – 2016), the deeply underappreciated artist who lived in New York, Chicago, and Michigan.

If there is such a thing as a formula for making a hit film, it has something to do with giving audiences a new and unusual villain. Over the years, screenwriters have thrown their protagonists up against enemies as thuggish as boss Johnny Friendly in 1954’s On the Waterfront and as smooth as Olivier’s Crassus as in 1960’s Spartacus. “The more successful the villain, the more successful the film,” as Hitchcock himself once put it. Which is why Hollywood’s constant search for new and unusual bad guys has explored almost every conceivable milieu: corporate America (The Big Short), street gangs (The Warriors), hospitals (Coma), prisons (Shawshank Redemption), law firms (The Firm), and even the movie studio itself (The Bad and the Beautiful).

When the Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis was recently asked by the BBC how she felt about the poor reviews she has received for her performance as Michelle Obama in the new Showtime series The First Lady, she was not coy in her response. "Critics absolutely serve no purpose," she replied. "And I’m not saying that to be nasty either. They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and 'I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth.' So it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you." The writer Brendan Behan once described a critic as being like "a eunuch in a harem.

Cockburn was crestfallen to learn that James Corden is set to end his tenure as host of The Late Late Show next year. In his eight-year stint Corden has cemented his status as the most welcome British export to America since class snobbery and weak, milky tea.

The fact that the master songwriter Bob Dylan is a fan of a literary allusion should come as no surprise. This is the man who, in his autobiography Chronicles Vol. 1, declared that reading the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud made “bells [go] off.” (Incidentally, it was Suze Rotolo, his first love whom he so cruelly lambasted in “Ballad of Plain D,” who introduced him to the poet. One feels that Dylan should have paid her a little more retrospective credit than the all-but-bitter love songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

One of the most enduring images from the Oscars came two decades ago, at the 2002 ceremony, when director David Lynch revealed himself as one of the most courteous and pleasant figures in contemporary cinema. Ron Howard had just won the Best Director award for his work on the dishonest and ephemeral mental health drama A Beautiful Mind. As the beaming Howard — one of the most popular figures in Hollywood — headed onto the stage to collect his prize, two of his defeated rivals, Robert Altman and Lynch, embraced one another.