Troubles in paradise
Belfast reviewed
Film
Thursday
Buster’s land stand
Buster Keaton is again of the moment
Wednesday
Why does Hollywood ruin literature’s best characters?
What Kenneth Branagh has done to Poirot borders on literary mutiny
Sunday
Naples and nurture
The Hand of God reviewed
Witches brew
The Tragedy of Macbeth reviewed
Monday
John Wayne behind the blue line
The Seventies weren’t John Wayne’s decade, and that was fine by him
Serve and volley
King Richard reviewed
Monday
Richard Lester at ninety
He lent ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ the spirit of untamed frivolity
Monday
Turning the page on James Bond
James Bond was first a literary hero
Eternal Eastwood
Cry Macho reviewed
Sunday
Fatty Arbuckle’s fall
Arbuckle was an accidental pioneer of cancel culture
Thursday
Watching The Woman in the Window
The Woman in the Window reviewed
Sunday
Vacation time
The enduring popularity of the Vacation series reflects not just the American appetite for travel, but also that old American virtue of gung-ho optimism
Wednesday
The last American video store
Video killed the video store
Friday
Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans
For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life
Wednesday
Here’s looking at you, Kid
One hundred years on from the seminal Chaplin flick
Friday
Don’t insult Joker by comparing him to Trump
What Todd Phillips’s film tells us about protest movements
Saturday
Louise Linton: why I don’t like being ‘the wife of…’
I married a politician. But my identity is not defined by my husband
Wednesday
No, Mary Poppins Returns isn’t racist
Another piece of elite idiocy in The New York Times
Thursday
Idris Elba’s directorial debut is a patchy disappointment
Yardie is Idris Elba’s first film as a director and what I have to say isn’t what I wanted to say at all. I love Elba and wanted this to be terrific. I wanted him to be as good from behind as he is from the front, so to speak. I wanted this to absolutely smash it as a narrative about the Jamaican-British experience as there have been so few. But, alas, it is a disappointment. It is patchy. It’s not paced excitingly. The characters are insufficiently drawn. And I struggled with the thick Jamaican patois, I must confess. I was often muddled, yet whether it was due to that
