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“... driver in Kirill’s place. The scene takes place in a public baths. You get the idea: two men in black with short sharp knives and an intended victim with no clothes on: lots of blood and grunting; two deaths, one gouged eye; one unlikely survivor. It can’t be that Cronenberg has lost control here, since the scene is beautifully choreographed. But what ...”

“... eerie and memorable in the movie has to do with this head-on approach. The colours shift into near black-and-white, or into faded, altered versions of shades we think we know. Figures vanish into a fog, only bent silhouettes remaining, as if they were slim relics of a Henry Moore exhibition. The screen goes dark. The screen goes white. A traffic light becomes ...”

“... five years for manslaughter and committed suicide soon after his release. The film opens over black and white footage of police rounding up and beating up gays in the early 1970s. Newspaper headlines fill the screen, the effect is that of an old-time newsreel. Then we cut to Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, looking drained and sorrowful and a little scared, but ...”

“... this decision, as about almost everything else, and his recent movies – Femme Fatale (2002), The Black Dahlia (2006), Redacted (2007), Passion (2012) – are never less than interesting. De Palma has some good comments on the Hollywood system. ‘People are paid a lot of money to get you to do what they want you to do.’ This is by way of excuse for his ...”

“... disorientating. But the contrast between the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach from some Scandi-noir outside – and the derisory and unsightly paintings was troubling. One felt a little ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... were three other people in the dock, charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. One of them was Michael Murray, a workmate of two of the six, who made no secret of his membership of the IRA. In the best IRA tradition he chose not to participate in the proceedings. His presence in the dock alongside the six was deeply damaging to their case. This is no doubt ...”

“... The stocking cap, solid black on top and red-ribbed across the tube, an eye popping out at the face end. Red outline for ear, forked red line for mouth, blue-grey near-rectangle vertically placed for shoulder. These lines and shapes precipitate a face, itself un-outlined, from out of white space, the unmistakable head of Harpo Marx ...”

“... the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the millwheel. There you have a moonlit night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable.Paustovsky is a ...”

“... What’s striking about McEwan’s later work – I’m thinking particularly of The Innocent, Black Dogs and his new novel Enduring Love – is its intimacy with evasion and failure, combined with an alert intelligence about these things which itself looks like grounds for hope. McEwan’s characters talk past each other, go manic, stumble into ...”

“... most of the world’s supply of the gems. It appears never to have occurred to them that the black migrants who dig the diamonds out of the ground have any grievances. A much more serious problem for the mining companies has been that the miners might steal diamonds, swallow them, excrete them and sell them on the open market. This is one of the reasons ...”

“... the first of six Pontic rulers to bear the name Mithridates had welded the Greek cities of the Black Sea coast to the Persian and Anatolian lands of the interior to create one of the most successful such mini-states. Mithridates Eupator could likewise face in both directions, a cultured Greek on the one hand, with a fabricated ancestry stretching back to ...”

“... anyone could make. I keep wondering how the film manages to stay so light in spite of the notional black comedy of its plot. I think it has something to do with the sense of being out of time that I mentioned earlier: not timeless, but resistant to time. The film is about ingenuity and pleasure taking over from need, and this goes for its casting as well as ...”

“... Chaplin made when everyone else had turned to sound. Have I mentioned that the whole thing is in black and white? The Artist is not a silent film, though, and not a reconstruction of one. It is a silenced film, in which almost all noise except the off-story music has been suppressed. We don’t hear people speak within the film, and we don’t hear any ...”

“... American, the CIA chief played with impeccable, icy charm by Robin Wright, hair cut short and dyed black, but otherwise much in the style of her role in the American version of House of Cards. She and Bachmann have a remarkable exchange about their goals, about what all this secrecy and illegality and interference is for. ‘It’s about saving lives,’ she ...”