Film

• Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2023) — BEWARE: SPOILERS! I went to see Barbie wearing pink. My friends were wearing pink. When we arrived at Peckhamplex in South London, almost everyone else was wearing pink. People walking past the cinema to do something else were wearing pink. Not since 'The Queue' has London given itself over to such an all-consuming cultural event. Variety reports that the marketing budget allocated to Barbie was a staggering $150 million — $5 millionmore than the film's production costs. Indeed, much of the film’s success can be put down to the fact that before it hit...

In a sense films have never been ‘silent’. Big cinemas in cities often had a full orchestra to accompany the film

While the horror film genre exploits the female body as a site of terror, women artists can weaponise the same theme as a powerful creative source. Here, Liliana Pavier examines fine art objects through the lens of the horror film genre. WANGECHI MUTU: MYTHMAKING Wangechi Mutu is a self-proclaimed “irresponsible anthropologist and irrational scientist” and uses the canonically exploited black, female body as her point of departure. She fragments and distorts with collage and mixed media, splicing cuttings from magazines with medical diagrams. Mutu’s collages merge monstrous mythology with the...

1943: In the middle of an air raid Maria and Hermann are married

The famous Czech writer, Milan Kundera, died on 11 July. Best-known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he also wrote The Joke in 1967. Adapted for the screen by Czech film director Jaromil Jireš in 1969, the “joke” in question refers to a comment by the main protagonist Ludvik Jahn, a Young Communist, who sends a postcard to his lover, Markéta, while attending a Party Summer School. Ludvik thinks Markéta is far too serious and although the postcard is obviously meant as a (not very funny) joke, the repercussions are serious. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people. A ‘healthy...

Did audiences in a US cinema buy extra Coca Cola and popcorn because of so-called subliminal advertising?

It could produce the most immediately recognisable picket lines in the entire history of trade union disputes

Gleaning is the ancient practice of going into a field after the harvest and picking up any fruit, cereal or root crops left behind. Its most famous representation is the painting by Jean-Francois Millet, “The Gleaners”, which he completed in 1857. What the painting represented was “updated”, as it were, by French director Agnès Varda in 2000 with her documentary The Gleaners and I . Shot in various locations in France, including the suburbs of Paris, film shows modern day gleaners doing very much what their ancestors have done for hundreds of years. They explain in their own words why they do...

Most spy films are rubbish but The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (directed by Martin Ritt, 1965), based on the novel by John Le Carré, is an exception. The drama centres on Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), who is set-up by MI6 to go into East Germany to unmask Mundt, an intelligence operative causing problems for British operations in Berlin. However, Mundt, a one-time Nazi sympathiser, is actually working with the British, and the real purpose of the mission is destroy Fiedler, another East German agent who is close to exposing Mundt as a double agent. The grim plot of betrayal and counter...

I once heard of a man in Newcastle who stipulated that when he died there should be no funeral service for him. Anyone who cared for his memory should instead watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs , a 1978 film written and directed by the Italian Ermanno Olmi. It was a good choice. Apart from other considerations, this is one of the great Italian films of the post-Neorealist period. Set in Lombardy in the late 19th century, the film depicts the working lives and utter hardship of four families (all played by local non-professionals) who work on the farm of a local landowner. A priest tells Bastiti...