Quentin Tarantino has reportedly scrapped what was supposed to be his tenth and final feature film, The Movie Critic, deep into pre-production. This decision is one in a long line of cancelled or unproduced projects left by the Hollywood wayside. For every film that makes it to our screens, hundreds if not thousands fail to… Continue reading Tarantino abandons his tenth film – five other times Hollywood giants cancelled big projects
Trần Anh Hùng, the Vietnamese-born French director known for his Oscar-nominated film The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) and Norwegian Wood (2010), returns with another gorgeous work, The Taste of Things. Due for UK release in February 2024, the film is already out in France. The Taste of Things won the best director award at… Continue reading The Taste of Things review: this gastronomic French tale is a feast for the senses
Science fiction is never really about the future. The best sci-fi makes use of an imagined future world to provide a critical distance from our current time; to ask questions about what we are doing rather than where we are going. Director Garth Davis’ Foe, adapted from the novel by Iain Reid, is sci-fi for… Continue reading Foe review: a Frankenstein tale of the not-so-distant future
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?
The ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) image colourization were recently brought to public attention when several historical images were altered using digital algorithms. Irish artist Matt Loughrey digitally colourized and added smiles to photos of tortured prisoners from Security Prison 21 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which was used by the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79.… Continue reading The controversial history of colourising black-and-white photos
India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, implemented the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, or 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… Continue reading Indian protesters look to poetic tradition to resist Modi’s Hindu nationalism
Featuring Pam Hawkes and George Underwood, each belonging to a particular strain of European art – one that focuses on the senses and the mind over pure logic and realism, a tradition stretching back to the dark ages via Fuseli, Bruegel and Bosch. Pam Hawkes This new collection of work by Pam Hawkes is an… Continue reading Modern Gothic at the Catto gallery
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
Ideas about the soul have been powerful throughout the history of religion and philosophy. Until the 19th-century, most people took the existence of souls for granted. With the rise of modern psychology, this belief lost its plausibility, and today it is largely absent from academic philosophical and even theological writing. Many now deny the existence… Continue reading How Disney took Plato’s view of existence and added a modern twist
