It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
There are many good films on gambling but few have the frenetic energy of Uncut Gems. It is a film that moves so erratically fast that the plot isn’t so much hard to follow but difficult to keep pace with. When we usually speak of following a story, the verb is rarely associated with the speed of the work even if the term implies it. To follow a film, to keep up with, to keep pace with, all …
Scottish literature may appear minor next to English, French, Russian or Italian fiction. However, it still happens to be vast enough for any attempt at a summary in essay form to be foolish without winnowing the work down to a narrow corpus, a chiefly contemporary concern and a handful of stories. Many have surveyed a broader terrain — but even Alan Bold looked at only Modern Sottish Litera…
1 Perhaps in a very different way from my brother, it was always a question of power. How to enjoy the game without getting caught in the competition? I wouldn’t say I was impervious to the desire to win but it always seemed to me that the victory had to be one’s own no matter if I was playing with teammates, for the club, even for the town. My footballing career never went further tha…
Introducing Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva for the BBC Moviedrome series on cult films, Alex Cox reckoned the movie had no direction, only art direction. He said it was the only film he had ever seen where the walls, the set decoration, thecostumes, had all been designed around a packet of Gitanes cigarettes. A fine filmmaker himself (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy), Cox was maybe too busy directing f…