Film

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial backing for a film inspired by Last Tango in Paris. They schmooze. They lunch. They cajole. They beg. And in the process meet, among others, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ryan Gosling as well as the billionaire shipping heir and journalist Taki, who writes the High life column in this magazine, and

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared. And this season is shaping up better than most.

‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, as the theatre has been called since it was founded in 1997, is unusual for a theatre in that it makes a large annual profit, without receiving public funding. How? Its unique angle means it has no need to market itself – what’s more attractive to an American audience than Shakespeare, in London, in a reconstructed Shakespearean theatre? But its decision to put all Shakespearean productions on hold to make way for another dramatist is a decision which Lloyd Evans isn’t too sure about. Samuel Adamson’s Gabriel may be accompanied by some lovely Purcell music, but the actual play’s content leaves much to be desired. Theoretically, there’s nothing

Sandra Bullock is a highly watchable actress and she seems like she’d be fun to hang out with — I have no idea why I think that; I just do — but, Jesus, how does she choose her movies? With a blindfold and pin? Sure, she won an Oscar for The Blind Side, during which she dragged around that poor black boy as if he were a tired old circus bear, and there was Speed and After You Were Sleeping, but The Proposal? Premonition? Speed 2? Two Weeks Notice? I suppose you think I’m going to add: ‘And now this?’ which I am, although not unreservedly. It’s not all bad.

Bradley Manning’s relationship with Wikileaks has, inevitably, brought Julian Assange back into the papers. Viewed on the frontpage, Assange is egimatic. We know what he’s done; but we know little of him. Alex Gibney’s compelling new documentary film We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks presents an extensive and revealing biography of Assange — and much more besides. Gibney’s camera is impartial. We hear from Assange cultists, former collaborators and alleged rape victims. No two people will react in the same way to what they see. A white-haired Icarus formed before my eyes; a charismatic brought down by his own narcissism and hubris. Gibney captures one deeply ironic moment when Assange is reading fawning

The Tate Britain has recently undergone a ‘sorely needed’ rehang, which Andrew Lambirth explores in this week’s Spectator.  As a ‘welcome return to the great tradition of the chronological hang’ might have its detractors, but the BP Walk Through British Art is, overall, a fantastic display. Here’s the director of Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis (who was in charge of the reorganisation) talking about her highlights from the display. And here are Andrew Lambirth’s own highlights. Has sod you architecture finally ‘put on a lounge suit’ asks Stephen Bayley.  That, at least, was the dress code that Richard Rogers applied to the opening of his new retrospective, Inside Out, at the Royal

Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has

In this week’s lead feature in the Arts section, Tom Rosenthal explains just why he thinks the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain is so long overdue. Lowry is one of our most popular artists – and it is exactly this that has been his downfall. ‘Can one disapprove of someone merely because he popular? Clearly one can’, writes Rosenthal. The lack of Lowry in London only highlights ‘the fashionable dislike of Lowry’s art’. But, finally, Lowry has made it to the walls of Tate Britain. Should his work be there? Andrew Lambirth will be reviewing the exhibition in a future issue of The Spectator, but for now you can make

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, on at the Lyttleton, has been

Neil Jordan’s Byzantium may well be stylish and moody — so moody, in fact, I wanted to send it to its bedroom with the instruction it could only come down again when less sulky — and Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan may well be fine actresses, but yet another vampire film? Really? True, it plays with the tropes a little. There’s a mother and daughter twist. There are no pointy teeth, just pointy thumbnails. But that thing vampires do, after they’ve sucked human blood and then look up, with blood-smeared lips and chin? That’s here, plentifully, and it always makes me wonder why vampires have such bad table manners. Weren’t