I wrote this in June, during the NFT’s awesome Antonioni season. Anyhoo, it makes no sense at all now that ‘The Passenger’ is getting a re-release, but maybe I don’t want Antonioni’s film to become another ‘Big Red[…]

If you could get past the insane suggestion that the Modern Review was the first publication in the history of the world to ‘take popular culture seriously’, the BBC4 doc ‘When Toby Met Julie’ did provide, possibly unwittingly[…]

I had a sublime experience watching Primal Scream at Glastonbury a few years ago. There. I. Said. It. They popped up on BBC3 yesterday with ColinandEdith, and it was a… ridiculous experience. Booby Gillespie’s (real typo, kids) ‘I a[…]

‘No one in France had been taking film seriously. Then people were saying you had to […] that was the the thing we had to do first: force it on people that there was “work,” even if you have to tell them now that they’ve[…]

This is a real blog entry right here, folks: ace critic Raymond Durgnat takes on Sight and Sound, the BFI, Hoggart, Leavis, the Free Cinema etc etc, forty years ago. (Later he made up with Anderson, a bit.)
Until it was posted, this piece was rare as[…]

Cinema: Still Dying After All These Years
“Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It&#82[…]

You Won’t Find Me in the Matinee
Far more than attitues to on-screen sex, the 9 Songs saga has shown up reviewers’ difficulties with music. The issue is key in 9 Songs because in some ways it’s a concert film. Some reviews have atte[…]

Kill yr idols, right? I can’t face this book, don’t want to. This is probably not the first time I’ve bashed David Thomson here, and I’ve not got round to the long and hard work of finding what’s gone wrong and how, but […]

In the offending Torygraph article, Charles Moore, in describing a Channel 4 advertorial for a Christmas comedy show, makes the following point:
The tableau is presented (sub-Bunuel) as a parody of the Last Supper… The first page shows a line […]

From the front line: you probably won’t notice the cuts in the Arts Council budget, and the furore over them masks the fact that ‘the arts’ are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked, whatever the measly sum given them by New La[…]