The filmmakers behind Love Lies Bleeding (director Rose Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska) are, as Glass describes “obviously … both film nerds”. The film has a broad archive of references ranging from the works of influential queer filmmaker John Waters to The Incredible Hulk (2008). A neo-noir, queer crime thriller, Love Lies Bleeding also… Continue reading Love Lies Bleeding review — this vengeful queer romance is a visceral cinematic experience
The film, directed by Mark Mylod, known for producing and directing the acclaimed series Succession, satirises the culture of high-end dining. From the perspective of our combined expertise in food and literary studies and sexuality studies, we’re interested in how the film asks us to consider what’s left when even the most fundamental bodily pleasures… Continue reading The Menu review — delve into foodie snobbery when you’re dying for a cheeseburger
Never one to downplay the power of film, Stanley Kubrick once said that “almost every novel could be successfully adapted”. He carried this confidence into his own filmmaking, working not from original screenplays, but from adaptations of novels as different as William Makepeace Thackeray’s historical romp Barry Lyndon (1844) and Vladimir Nabokov’s erotic fantasy Lolita… Continue reading White Noise review — director Noah Baumbach skilfully captures Don DeLillo’s “unadaptable” novel
Nothing about The Green Knight, the new film from director David Lowery, is comfortable. From its opening scene, where Gawain (Dev Patel) sits in an empty throne room, a crown menacingly hovering above his head as flames suddenly engulf him, this film is wonderfully unsettling. The Green Knight is a reimagining of the Middle English… Continue reading The Green Knight review — a wonderfully unsettling cinematic reimagining of the medieval story of Sir Gawain
As a mother trying to raise a daughter free from the gendered stereotypes of my own childhood, I steered her clear of Barbie dolls. I felt compelled to nudge my now 11-year-old away from the Mattel mainstay for the same reasons I tried to avoid the shallow frivolity of all those Disney princesses waiting around… Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love the doll – a feminist philosopher’s journey back to Barbie
There has been much discussion about the film’s feminist potential (or betrayal). What’s not being talked about in mainstream reviews is disability. This seems strange when two of the film’s main characters are disabled. Set in a fantasy version of Victorian London, unorthodox Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) finds the just-dead body of a heavily… Continue reading Should Poor Things be recognised as a film about disability?
There have been more than 60,000 books written about Napoleon since his death in 1821. Cinema too has been drawn to him time and again. The Lumière brothers made a short film in 1897 and he featured in the mostly lost British film The Battle of Waterloo (1913). Already, the standard image of Napoleon was… Continue reading Napoleon Bonaparte features in 60,000 books and more than 100 films — does Ridley Scott’s stand up?
India’s government, led by prime minister Narendra Modi, implemented the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in March 2024. Opponents of the law — which fast-tracks citizenship for undocumented, non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — decry the ways in which it discriminates against Muslims. As they did when the law was passed in 2019,… Continue reading Indian protesters look to poetic tradition to resist Modi’s Hindu nationalism
There is a striking photo, taken in 2015, of a deactivated nuclear missile at an air and space museum in Tucson, Arizona. Written in dust on this missile are the words: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. These words, from the Sanskrit scriptural text the Bhagavad Gita, are famously attributed to J.… Continue reading “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — the Bhagavad Gita explained
“Italy had its Renaissance, Germany its Reformation, France had Voltaire”, the historian Will Durant once commented. Born François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire (1694–1778) was known in his lifetime as the “patriarch” of the French Enlightenment. A man of extraordinary energy and abilities, he produced some 100 volumes of poetry, fiction, theatre, biblical and literary criticism, history and… Continue reading Voltaire’s Candide — a darkly satirical tale of human folly in times of crisis
