I went to a showing of The Batman (Matt Reeves 2022). Its hard-boiled saga, stretching through the crystal landscape of Gotham, adding a layer of Blade Runner’s 2019 LA to a bedraggled vision of New York, all steel doors, weeping concrete, and classical Deco Gothic. The narrative assumes you already…

Hi Mom 你好，李焕英, (Jia Ling 贾玲 2021) and Last Night in Soho, (Edgar Wright 2021) In movies, traversing time and place has never been easier. Now, there is little need for rattling control panels or to channel lightning into a power-hungry flux-capacitor; everyone assumes time travel is part of modern…

Psycho Goreman (Steven Kostanski 2020) It will seem petty to disparage Psycho Goreman, a lovable and wacky teen movie with an overwhelming central performance from Nita-Josee Hanna. However, the genre merging horror, sci-fi, screwball comedy is deplorable. The film rejoices in the motif of enslavement. It normalizes it, and even…

Nomadland (Chloé Zhao 2020) & Once Upon a River (Haroula Rose 2019) As the dust settles on the accolades bestowed to Chloé Zhao and Frances McDormand for Nomadland, I am curious to consider how the movie questions if independence is possible in societies systemically inflected by perfectionism. To assess this…

I only encountered German artist Joseph Beuys towards the end of his life in 1985. It was the opening of his exhibition Plight at London’s Antony D’Offay gallery. Outside it felt like the UK was at war. On one side, the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, worked to disempower the…

Ilya Naishuller violent thriller movie Nobody with Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again Katherine Angel’s slim book-length essay Tomorrow Sex will be Good Again has attracted the attention of various commentators looking for means to rethink today’s conundrums of sex, coercion, and power. The book’s context is Angel’s…

With cavalier indifference to biopic accuracy, in Ammonite, Francis Lee addresses interclass love at a time when the stratification of rank in Britain was as petrified as the life forms palaeontologist Mary Anning finds crushed in rocks. She is a scavenger, wrestling amorphous boulders from drab cliffs in howling winds…

It is not every week that a fig-leaf metaphor is used in diverse contexts on the same day. It struck me as disturbing. Why did it surprisingly pop into more than one head? ‘One country, two systems’ is now merely a fig leaf covering for the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding…

A number on the street made no announcement. You were admitted, buzzed, through a steel door into a grey quadrangle. You turned left into a courtyard perpendicular to the quad. On the far side was the way in. Inside you were elevated, a few concrete steps above a large space…