Arts Reviews

The director recognises Trump’s startling originality and willingness to look beyond the taken-for-granted modus operandi of the Washington Establishment.

This is a golden age for documentaries, if you have time to view them. Digital film and editing have reduced the cost of making a documentary, and online streaming has resolved the problem of distribution. The result is a glut of documentaries, generally well-made, and generally too long. Lorna Tucker’s Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist comes … Read more

‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the table outside a café in Highgate. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’ It turns out the girlfriend is no longer the girlfriend. ‘You broke up? You know, that happens. It’ll be OK. You’ll meet somebody else.’ He pauses and then says something that runs through my head for days after our interview. ‘She’ll meet somebody else.’ It’s true, of course; she will. And it’s a human thing to say: both parties to the relationship will move on. But it’s also delivered with a hint of claws. Who wants to be told, fresh from

Conrad Black explains how the President consistently and hilariously outplays his enemies, provoking and then exploiting the friction between him and them to raise himself to ever greater heights.

Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack … Read more

Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with … Read more

Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the confounding My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which rightly became the most highly acclaimed hip-hop album this century. He went on to make controversial public art with his ‘New Slaves’ video, which was projected in 66 locations around the world (called Orwellian by admirers and dumbfounded detractors). With news-making political statements occasionally interspersing that résumé, West

Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good … Read more

Couldn’t ABC have reminded people that Roseanne Barr is mentally ill, and more in need of treatment than degradation?

Arranging a dinner between Tom Wolfe and Christopher Hitchens led to my immortalisation in literature.

‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more

The ‘Hollywood prince who torched the castle’ is to this decade what Samantha Power was to the last

Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other … Read more

Because we’re living under the New Misogyny

By ceasing its promotion of R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music, Spotify aims to show its users that they are headed towards the moral promised land.