Search Results

“... pay for them. But their children will, and so will ours – and not with money. Keith Thomas and Michael Wood spoke at ‘Universities under Attack’, a conference sponsored by the ‘London Review’, the ‘New York Review’ and Fritt Ord held on 26 November at King’s College ...”

“... may be no escape from the scene, no return to whatever world there was before the movie took over. ...”

“... her. We were Macbeth until the camera shifted. We even get to see the lopped branches from Birnam Wood on their way to Dunsinane, which Macbeth learns of only by report. Some critics have felt the film is not grand enough, not up to the high rhetoric of its speeches, but the low-key acting adds a human element to scenes that are often played as ...”

“... she is the daughter of the arch-capo of this world, a Russian known as White Death, played by Michael Shannon.So what happens to this assembly? Well, having set up some tricky plot possibilities, the film loses all interest in them for quite a while, concentrating on ragged violence instead. Mainly people beat each other up, grabbing whatever hard ...”

“... The​ first thing that dies in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (which will be in cinemas from 17 May) is a town called Empire, in Nevada. The life-supporting sheetrock plant shuts down, the people leave, even the zip code vanishes. A woman called Fern, played by Frances McDormand, takes up residence in a van. She spends a Christmas season working at an Amazon warehouse, and hopes for jobs elsewhere ...”

“... It’s too late to climb on the bandwagon now, and it wasn’t much of a bandwagon to start with. If cinephilia is dead, as Susan Sontag some time ago suggested it was, who cares about the simultaneous death of two cinéastes? Still, no reader of signs can resist a coincidence, the image of a meaning that can’t be there. Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) and Ingmar Bergman (born 1918) both died on 30 July 2007 – as if time, otherwise indifferent to plot and meaning, had something to say about the cinema ...”

“... that kept failing to get its act together. (The OED says it was first used in its present sense by Michael Moorcock in 1963.) ‘Visible nature,’ James wrote, ‘is all plasticity and indifference, a multiverse, as one might call it, and not a universe.’ Kwan and Scheinert almost certainly weren’t thinking of this meaning when they worried about the ...”

“... model for what he should do with his vanishing time. He is more engaged by Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), the irreverent inventor of the zombie nickname, whom he takes to lunch after bumping into her in the street. For him, she is not only an attractive young woman but an unintelligible instance of life itself, lived as if all you have to do is live it. He ...”

“... if you really wanted it to be another movie. The instant involves a tight close-up on the face of Michael Fassbender as Edwin Epps, the vicious second owner of Northup. He is, characteristically, reading to his slaves a passage from the Bible about the administration of stripes or lashes, and there is something about the closeness of the camera here, and the ...”

“... he seems more a curser than a killer. Reynolds, as Jackson’s supposed protector, the bodyguard Michael Bryce, says he has ‘single-handedly ruined the word motherfucker’. I don’t know about the ruin, but he certainly uses the word a lot. We may have thought there was going to be a bit of metaplay in the film when we learned that the Japanese ...”

“... appears in so many legends and quite a bit of history. And in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia and Michael Dibdin, where a crucial question about any crime is not who did it, but what to do with any knowledge you may have of this fact. Is there anyone you could report it to who might not be the criminal’s friend or protector? The same question arises in the ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t ...”

“... of the set-up towards the end of the film, when Romeo has killed Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Michael York). He is already (secretly) married to Juliet, and will now be banned from Verona for his misdeed. Her parents, meanwhile, are proceeding with their plan to marry her to Count Paris, and even her nurse recommends that she go along with that ...”

“... in Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). Though the obvious does occasionally have to be explained. As Michael Corleone says in The Godfather Part II, ‘if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ It’s an accident, of course, that another Corleone is played by Robert De Niro, the first of the ludicrously quarrelling men in Killers of ...”

“... The​ new Bond film, No Time to Die, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, begins inside a memory and ends with a kind of apocalypse. Sound familiar? Not really. Memory has never been a prominent theme in the series, and the mood of this instalment is different in many ways, even if the concerns of the plot and most of the main characters come from Spectre (2015 ...”