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Oct 23, 2024 | 
bbc.co.uk | Lillian Crawford
Ever since his 1988 debut The Swimming-Pool Library caused a stir, Hollinghurst has captured the hedonism of affluent gay men with both candour and literary elegance. "He looks battered, but is smiling, / like an old seaman, nearly at rest. / A gold-haired boy twirls upside-down on rings." These lines come from Alan Hollinghurst's poem Isherwood is at Santa Monica, published in 1975 while he was reading English at Magdalen College, Oxford.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | David Parkinson |Lillian Crawford |Bertolt Brecht |David Parkinson Obituaries
“That girl has a magic,” Kenneth Williams confided to his diary while appearing in Peter Shaffer’s twinned 1962 plays The Private Ear and The Public Eye opposite Maggie Smith. He also noted that Smith had “a deftness of touch in comedy that makes you really grateful”. But Smith herself, who has died aged 89, had mixed feelings about her gift. “I got pigeonholed in humour,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jasper Sharp |Ryan Swen |David Parkinson |Lillian Crawford
There’s a hint of the supernatural in the closing scenes of Imamura Shôhei’s 1983 Palme d’Or winner, The Ballad of Narayama, a film for the most part marked by its adherence to a documentary style of realism that feels more akin to the world of David Attenborough.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Lillian Crawford |to Irma Vep |Bérénice Reynaud
Director Robert Hamer was one of the most prolific and accomplished directors to rise through the ranks of Ealing Studios. He was famous for both comedies – in particular Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and School for Scoundrels (1960) – and crime films, especially The Long Memory (1953) and The Scapegoat (1959). His greatest crime thriller, however, was undeniably his pitch-black 1947 drama It Always Rains on Sunday.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Scovell |Lillian Crawford |to Irma Vep |Bérénice Reynaud
David Lean was one of Britain’s most successful directors. Few managed to match his effective mixing of artful visuals, emotional depth and accessible drama, building a highly respected career littered with masterpieces such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Lillian Crawford |Michael Brooke |Sam Wigley |to Irma Vep
“All art is one, man, one,” Michael Powell wrote, defining his concept of the ‘composed’ film. It was an idea borne of Wagner’s application of the aesthetic idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, translated by Brecht into ‘epic theatre’ and Powell into cinema: that is, the fusion of multiple art forms into a single whole. For example, music and image brought together as opera or ballet, and then heightened in cinema through editing and camerawork.
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Jun 5, 2024 | 
plinth.uk.com | Lillian Crawford
Better than Her A man walks into a bar. He sees a woman sitting on her own, an unlit cigarette between her lips, her glass empty. He goes and sits next to her, pulls out his phone, and tells his AI date how beautiful she is. 'Oh stop it, you’re making me blush!' That’s how Open AI’s new GPT-4o update responded to a bit of light flirting at a recent demonstration, delivered with a flattered giggle. Meanwhile the woman at the stool next to the man rolls her eyes and walks away.
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May 7, 2024 | 
flicks.co.uk | Eliza Janssen |Lillian Crawford |Steve Newall |Liam Maguren
Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly-starring sci-fi Dark Matter. In Apple TV+’s luxurious, new sci-fi Dark Matter, a man is kidnapped by himself. Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) is en route home from the bar where his friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) has been hosting celebratory drinks—he’s been awarded some esteemed scientific prize that really should have been Jason’s.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
flicks.co.uk | Eliza Janssen |Lillian Crawford |Rory Doherty |Clarisse Loughrey
Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Given the chance, Dead Boy Detectives could become a new supernatural drama classic. Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives seems awfully familiar. It’s a case-of-the-week style supernatural drama that gets all twisted up in teenage concerns. It features love triangles and toxic exes, yet the participants are just as likely to be human as they are ghost, demon, or transmogrified raven.
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Mar 22, 2024 | 
bbc.com | Lillian Crawford
Bluebeard: Why the grimmest of fairytales is still all-too-relevantBy Lillian Crawford,Features correspondentRobbie Jack/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe old French folk story about a young bride and her monstrous husband is a harrowing fable that continues to inspire powerful modern adaptations, writes Lillian Crawford. "Once upon a time… Where did this happen? Outside or within?" Thus begins the prologue of Béla Balázs's libretto for the 1918 opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, with music by Béla Bartók.
