She tamed Keith Moon, got laughed into bed by Bob Dylan and went to a young David Bowie’s house for tuna sandwiches – but the blues singer’s 72 albums are what really define her“No one has understood how deeply rooted in music I am because they got dis…
Pedro Almodóvar’s films – ranked!
With his new film, Parallel Mothers, to be shown at Venice film festival, we take a look through the director’s ribald, pell-mell and beautifully colour co-ordinated outputAirline staff and passengers take drugs and act out their sexual fantasies as th…
Summer of Soul
In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns [ungated link] – “Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove.” (via) [1,2,3; fanfare] Sometimes these archival-footage documen…
Nic Cage chews scenery with gusto in Prisoners of the Ghostland trailer
The actor calls this “the wildest movie I’ve ever made… and that’s saying something.”
Frank Herbert heard “shows within shows” and got excited
Do you like fake movies and shows that only exist within the fiction of real movies and shows? Then you will enjoy Nestflix, a catalogue of metafictional entertainment from Lynn Fisher.
Man with a Movie Camera – Spectacular 1929 silent movie by Dziga Vertov
A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention. (SLYT) “It made explicit and poetic the astonishing gift the cinema made possible, of arranging what we see, ordering it, imposing a rhyt…
The Meaning of Hitler: exploring our cultural fascination with Nazism
In a wide-ranging new documentary, the lasting and insidious influence of the Nazi dictator is put under the microscope Start a conversation about Donald Trump these days and it’s only a matter of time before someone mentions Adolf Hitler.But if your s…
How India’s armed forces have become Bollywood’s new poster boys
A series of big films this year will focus on Indian military conflicts with Pakistan, reflecting an escalation of political belligerenceIndia’s military will take a starring role this summer. On 12 August, in time for Independence day on the 15th, Ama…
Beasts Clawing at Straws review – jet-black comedy in arch Korean thriller
A long-suffering sauna worker finds a bag stuffed full of cash in a crime caper with perfectly pitched performancesWhen Korean director Bong Joon-ho won the best picture Oscar in 2020 for his near-universally acclaimed Parasite, he suggested that maybe…
Midnight in the Switchgrass review – Bruce Willis and Megan Fox firmly in 90s mode
The flashy editing and schlock-by-numbers plot leave not much to like here, including an uncomfortably exploitative element Everything about this tawdry thriller feels dated, from the serial-killer premise that was all the rage back in the 1990s, to th…