One of the many criticisms levelled at romance novels is that they’re a poor model for women when it comes to real-life relationships. All that fairy tale nonsense, detractors say, will make women want the wrong things from their partners. I could list a dozen things wrong with […]
If the ending of No Country for Old Men left you unsatisfied, the Coen Brothers’ latest film, A Serious Man, will drive you insane. Because, although on the surface it seems like a film about how we tell stories to make sense of life, it reveals itself as […]
I never thought a courtroom would make a particularly good backdrop for romance. Drama, certainly, in a gavel-pounding, “you can’t handle the truth” sort of way. But I thought the procedural nature of the law, with its rules and regulations, and sheer mind-numbing attention to detail precluded any […]
Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is not, thank god, a film about growing up.
Britain and France have a long history together. Okay, much of that history consists of having wars with one another. But if you look at the past as a whole, having wars is pretty much what Britain did. First, it fought at home, its various tribes jockeying for […]
“Now, if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you’ve experienced it. But you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your [adjective deleted] telephone. Get real.”