West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg In the new West Side Story Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent music and Stephen Sondheim’s incisive and witty lyrics have all been preserved and bring as much pleasure as before.
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BFI. Ingmar Bergman Vol 2 (5 Blu-Ray discs). In the 1950’s we experience Ingmar Bergman’s gradual progression to full maturity as a filmmaker. The culmination of that journey was internationally recognised in such (now) iconic films as Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.
Spencer. Review by Graham Buchan. Pablo Larrain’s Spencer achieves a great deal that the other major bio-pic, Diana, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and released in 2013, did not.
Director David Greene has gone on record as saying that he finds upheaval in society to be dramatic and exciting. “I like my films to be a sort of reportage of the world around the action.” For me this accurately describes the effect of his three remarkable films of the late sixties. I Start Counting (1969), The Shuttered Room (1968) and The Strange Affair (1968) reveal a brilliantly confident sense of circumvention of plot and action.
Rarely does the cinema provide us with such perfect opportunities for directly (and appropriately) comparing the work of two very different auteurs, but the release, just two months apart, of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, provides just such an opportunity.
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, Victoria and Albert Museum. Review by Carla Scarano. .”..a marvellous but unsettling journey through the origin of Alice’s stories and their adaptations and reinventions in films, art, music, fashion, photography and design.”
A Fine Day for Seeing: ten artists/ten poets. In the wide art world, artists are often inspired by literature and writers write about artworks. This exhibition focuses on the collaboration between ten internationally known artists and ten renowned poets.
The Rome Plague Diaries, Lockdown Life in the Eternal City: In times when many of us have been wondering why we didn’t get ourselves stranded near a Caribbean beach, Matthew Kneale decided there was nowhere on the planet he would rather be locked down than where he was in his adoptive city of Rome.
Poetry review – COOKING WITH MARILYN: Emma Lee enjoys Angela Readman’s poetic portrait of a film star
The Painted Bird. Review by Julia Pascal. Vaclav Marhoul’s film, based on Jerzy Kosincksi’s 1969 novel, is the episodic survival story of a Jewish boy whose parents have been deported by the Nazis.
Ghost Light, National Theatre of Scotland film. A theatre never goes completely dark, even in lockdown: a single light bulb, known as a ghost light, carries on glowing like a sanctuary lamp.
Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. By Peter Stott. Review by Barbara Lewis.
A year before the Kyoto Protocol committed the developed world to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, Britain’s Education Act of 1996 incorporated the Thatcher government’s 1986 Education Act that was designed to deal with a perceived issue of left-wing teachers indoctrinating school pupils. Two decades on, mathematician Peter Stott found himself defending climate science against its deniers, who used Thatcher’s legal legacy to take to the High Court their objections to Al Gore’s climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth being streamed in schools.
By Barbara Lewis • books, ecology, film, politics, society • Tags: Barbara Lewis, books, ecology, film, politics, society