Category: Reviews
Jim Jarmusch: Only Indie Left Alive
Early on in Jim Jarmusch’s first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), its vagabond hero Allie reads aloud a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, and quickly announces he is bored by the meandering surrealistic narrative. Toward the end of Jarmusch’s eleventh and latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), vampire hero Adam watches a talented…
Art and the Movies: The Shadow of Perfection
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection,” said Michelangelo back in the day. In today’s high-end art world, where astronomical auction sales are now commonplace, there’s an impetus to maintain that exalted status for superstar artists both present and past. In this current state of affairs, where paintings can…
The best of films: Charles Dickens, the cinema, and the trials of adaptation
Could the film of a live performance be the definitive screen version of a Charles Dickens novel? I asked myself this recently after contemplating The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a masterful, 8-hour-long play adapted from the titular Dickens novel, which I saw on Broadway more than 30 years ago and now periodically rewatch…
Free to Play: E-Sports and the Gaming Revolution
Free to Play is a sports documentary in a familiar form; it follows the lives of a number of hopeful competitors approaching a huge tournament. These sorts of documentaries are a common method of celebrating a sport; they present an event as a humanised piece of history and offer a view into the world of…
War of the War Horses: Spielberg vs National Theatre Live
Steven Spielberg adaptations tend to take on a life and message all their own. They stray from their sources in surprising (and often effective) ways. For example, if you watched the original Jurassic Park (1993), you would find Hammond transformed from the villain of Michael Crichton’s novel into a sympathetic grandfather. His original fate (an…