Category: Films
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So bad it’s… bad
We were on holiday in Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall, visiting lots of Roman archaeological sites, so we thought we’d watch a movie set in that part of the world and that sort of time. The film Centurion is based on the story popularised by Rosemary Sutcliff in The Eagle Of…
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Judging hope
Martin Compston is best known for appearing in the entertainingly silly police fantasy Line of Duty, but his first acting role was in the grimly serious Ken Loach movie Sweet Sixteen in 2002. He was at the beginning of a career as a professional footballer, and auditioned for the lead…
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Keeping faith
Frank Herbert’s Dune has been a part of my life for many years—I started reading it for the first time just before I started secondary school. I re-read it several times, along with its sequels up to Chapterhouse Dune, after which I stopped trying to stay abreast of the series.…
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Vivid conviction
Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with actors who can improvise well, generating free-flowing, vernacular dialogue that’s sometimes hard to follow, but which creates an immersive sense that the audience is sharing their world with them. He’s…
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Rhyming cinema
One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total disconnect between Golden Age Hollywood movies and their posters. This is not a particularly egregious example, but still: ‘sky-high excitement atop a South American peak’ refers to scenes set and…
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Surface is depth
Orlando is a very complex and sophisticated film based on a very complex and sophisticated book which I haven’t read. For this and other reasons I’m sure I missed a great deal when I watched it, but I was thoroughly entertained. It has a very post-modern, nineties sheen to it…
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No conflict
The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were pretty much wiped out. But when the financial crash hit in 2008 the economy was less obviously predicated on a few huge industrial employers, and the ensuing collapse was more…
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Still hidden
Hidden Figures tells the long untold story of the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA in the 1950s and 60s, and who played a vital role in the glory days of the American space programme. These women were subject to a perfect storm of intersectionality, beginning their time…
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Menacing angles
Certain times in certain places almost produce stories by themselves. Post Second World War Vienna was one such, a city divided into administrative cantons by the four allied powers, from which they conducted a busy trade in espionage and back-channel diplomacy, until the occupation ended in 1955. This period of…
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Doing it every day
Watching the second film in our self-selected route through Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, I had in my mind the strengths and shortcomings of Mangrove, the first one we saw. That film is incredibly sharp on the politics, the history, and the drama of the events it depicts, but somewhat…
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Excavating justice
I don’t come from Suffolk, but I’ve lived here the vast majority of my adult life, and I have family roots across Suffolk and Norfolk. If I feel a sense of belonging to anywhere, it’s here. The green, gentle hills, the un-British lack of rainfall, the distinctive speech patterns of…
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Getting off the train
One of the books that has made the greatest impact on me is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. In that tetralogy the protagonist pledges his allegiance to a rebel leader, and after an epic series of adventures finds himself face-to-face with the authority against which he is rebelling—at…
Oliver Arditi 