Arts Reviews

Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing the science it was fictionalising. The story of a theme park populated by resurrected dinosaurs, it offered a portrayal of Mesozoic fauna that was as close to authentic as could then plausibly be achieved. For the first time, computer-generated imagery was used to portray dinosaurs as scientists had come to envisage them: agile, bird-like, smart.

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good … Read more

Couldn’t ABC have reminded people that Roseanne Barr is mentally ill, and more in need of treatment than degradation?

Arranging a dinner between Tom Wolfe and Christopher Hitchens led to my immortalisation in literature.

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more

The ‘Hollywood prince who torched the castle’ is to this decade what Samantha Power was to the last

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other … Read more

Because we’re living under the New Misogyny

By ceasing its promotion of R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music, Spotify aims to show its users that they are headed towards the moral promised land.

Tom Wolfe has died at the age of 87. In 1998, William Cash interviewed the great author for The Spectator: Yes, Tom Wolfe does own one of those 12-room Upper East Side apartments, as he wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities, ‘the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all … Read more

Racer and the Jailbird is a terrible name for a film. It sounds like an unsolicited tribute to that sorrily misbegotten Seventies’ genre, the action-comedy buddy movie—like Freebie and the Bean (1974) or Smokey and the Bandit (1977). But it is not. Nor, though the trailers for Racer and the Jailbird misrepresent it as such, … Read more

In, Bartlett Sher’s revival, Eliza Doolittle’s stalwart character is the great triumph.

Cynically timed to minimise news coverage, Katy Perry’s decision to bury the hatchet with Taylor Swift just as things are kicking off big style in the Middle East is nevertheless huge news. The parallels between the Swift/Perry crisis and the historic tensions in the Middle East have long been impossible to ignore. Both have come to define a generation, and … Read more

If Trump is rotten from the core, what the hell does that say about the popular culture we’ve all let flourish in the past few decades?

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection … Read more

It is now fifty years since the événements of May 1968, when young Parisians lobbed onobble stones at the police, occupied the Sorbonne, and launched the Boomers’ long march through the institutions. That makes it fifty years since Jean-Luc Godard lost the plot—never a good idea if you are a film-maker. Godard has made plenty … Read more