You know the feeling. One minute, you’re an oversexed adman, strolling the streets of Paris and propositioning every woman you pass. The next, you’ve walked into a lamp post, and knocked yourself unconscious. You wake up in the same Paris, but now the sex roles are reversed, and the hierarchies of power and values too. … Read more
The crusading lawyer waves the sword of justice around in order to distract us from the sleaze behind his shield.
This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes … Read more
Is ‘the perfect American food’ soaked in imperialism and all-male white chumminess?
Should the arts reflect the demographic make-up of their society, and be subject to quotas and affirmative action, in the name of diversity? Or should they be exempt from the imposition of quotas, as a meritocracy in which the only affirmative action is the one that recognises talent? This, I reckon, is the question at … Read more
Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack … Read more
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
Three theories on why the conservative author received a presidential pardon.
Three theories on why the conservative author received a presidential pardon.
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in the faith that style makes content. This, not the question of which way you dress, is the secret compact between tailor and client. ‘Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated
Couldn’t ABC have reminded people that Roseanne Barr is mentally ill, and more in need of treatment than degradation?
‘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
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
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
America, meet your European allies in the effort to contain Iran: Emmanuel Macron of France, Theresa May of Britain, and Angela Merkel of Germany. Think of them as the Three M’s. Or perhaps the Three Wise Monkeys. Or even, as the Wise Monkeys are sometimes known, and would probably prefer to be called, the Three … Read more
From our UK edition
For someone so frequently denounced as a liar, Donald Trump keeps an awful lot of promises. In the 2016 election campaign, he promised that he would take the United States out of the ‘terrible’ Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the ‘Iran deal’. Last October, he insisted that the Iran deal be renegotiated. In January, he
‘Honour,’ the French poet Nicholas Boileau wrote in 1666, ‘is like a rocky island without a landing place; once we leave it, we can’t get back.’ Especially, Donald Trump might add, when the outlook is Stormy. But Trump’s concept of honour is perhaps closer to that of Stormy Daniels’ fellow artist and near-namesake, the Elizabethan … Read more
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
Readers of Spectator’s USA’s mothership, the venerable yet sprightly London Spectator, will know that one of the secrets of the Spectator’s endurance and popularity is the promiscuity—ideological, of course—of its columnists. Turn the page from Matthew Parris to Rod Liddle, and you undergo a whiplash of the most bracing kind. Parris is an ex-Conservative MP … Read more
You have to give it to Donald Trump. Not for pushing North Korea towards negotiations, or for holding China to account over dumping low-grade steel onto the American market, or even for healing the diplomatic breach between France and the United States—but for missing the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night. People accuse … Read more
