A journal of cinema, television and the arts
Written & edited by Steve Exeter
Inspired by the New York Daily Inquirer from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
Editor’s pick
Long before Blue Moon, I had become interested in what happens to songwriting partnerships once their period of effortless alignment has passed. Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy remains one of the most perceptive explorations of that dynamic, concerned less with the triumphs of Gilbert and Sullivan than with the strain of having to…
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Sister Wives understands something many films about repression miss: the most dangerous thing in a closed system isn’t rebellion, it’s tenderness. Set inside a fundamentalist polygamous marriage, the film follows Kaidence…
I went into Song Sung Blue already inclined to like it. I was something of a musical magpie from an early, impressionable age, discovering Neil Diamond through my father’s record collection; his…
On my recent rewatch of Hello, Dolly! I was struck by how much more alive and charming it feels than its reputation suggests. For years it has been filed away…
Almost 20 years before the overhyped Inception focused on the phenomenon of dreaming Emir Kusturica directed Johnny Depp in the surreal comic fantasy Arizona Dream. The movie was produced by…
Despite taking the top awards at the 2011 Oscar Ceremony, or perhaps because of that, I was in no hurry to see director Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, although I…
Director Darren Aronofsky's award-winning film Black Swan is a dark and disturbing psychological thriller, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, focusing on the highly competitive and pressurised…
I was encouraged and excited to see that notable historian Patrick Vernon included the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus on his list of 100 Great Black Britons and that he ended…