But can Noam Chomsky play jazz flute?[…]

Some writers deploy an unanswerable style. Perry Anderson is one such: to read is to defer. Most of the time, anyway — but when the reader finds himself with the advantage, as I fear is the case here, the danger is that the whole edifice of aut[…]

I’ve become less self-conscious about walking out of films: second to get the chop this year was Jacques Lacan’s Psychoanalysis: Part One, after 45 of its threatened 60 minutes. The film, probably made for TV, was shot in 1974 by Benoit J[…]

Once upon a time New Left Review was in the vanguard of UK film culture, and once in a while it’s still capable of engaging. This piece on cultural tensions in Taiwan includes an interview with Hou Hsiao-Hsien which helps illuminate the backgro[…]

Well, I liked it. […]

Some welcome optimism from America’s greatest living movie critic here on my favourite subject: the way DVDs are changing movies. Surely the biggest factoid of the year is that, as the editor of Sight & Sound has said, theatrical[…]

Like Ned, I can’t really find the time to go to the cinema these days. However, I also have real trouble finding time for DVDs. Last night I felt like watching Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Actually getting through its 178 minute[…]

Sometimes I think I sort of miss the stupid broadsheet articles about Eminem that were such a feature of the early naughties.[…]

The documentary revival continues apace. I can only respond to this shower of neo-Griersonian glibness with a point of fact — ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ was made for TV — and await next year’s leader on how fantasy c[…]

I was about to moan about the number of Saul Bass press releases-cum-articles doing the rounds when I found this voice of reason in, of all places, the Guardian. Title sequences are obviously important, but importing auteurism into this particular fi[…]