‘Oh no, the lizard! The lizard’ I was heard to shout when I first watched Bringing Up Baby—in fact I…
Worlds and authorities
I was spurred by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Northern Lights to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy,…
None of this matters
The Big Lebowski is such a legendary movie that it’s almost embarrassing to admit this is the first time I’ve…
Luminous possibilities
Cwtch is a long-distance collaboration which concluded last year, between Paul Foster, a Welsh electronic music producer, and Marie Craven,…
A book to sort you out apiece
A viral disease is sweeping the world, killing indiscriminately. Well, nearly. Its fatal impact is concentrated in a particular minority,…
A play on the screen
I think of Shallow Grave as a film I know, but on reflection I think I saw it once, on…
For Pete’s sake!
In 1983 or 1984, I had a good look around Charles Jencks’s Thematic House, then recently completed. It is now…
Free play
One might be forgiven for thinking that the Joel and Ethan Coen made Barton Fink in order to dispel suspicions…
Worth digging
Funk Factory is something of a period piece. It comes from an era where the boundaries between jazz fusion and…
Reunion tour
Unspecified possibilities are the stuff of optimism. At the end of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, when Renton strolls off into the…
Abstract affective allegory
Like all the books published by ShortBox, Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s After Laughter is a beautiful object, printed to a high…
Filmic mythology
If the daft comedy Raising Arizona was a film made of style, with Miller’s Crossing the Coen Brothers showed that…
Habitable insouciance
I haven’t seen a great deal of James Stokoe’s work, but what I have seen has been right up my…
Socks off
Clever, metatextual movies don’t have to be intellectual or gnomic: sometimes they can just be hella entertaining. The most obvious…
