politics
Mark Sanderson
The first rule of temptation is to yield to it slowly, says a sozzled roué surrounded by semi-clad lovelies, it’s much more fun that way… The Hour is back and, the silly conspiracy strand sewn up at the end of the first series, better than ever.The BBC’s Lime Grove studios were never going to be a match for Madison Avenue but television news with its endless deadlines is far more exciting than advertising. If Abi Morgan’s retro-soap can’t be Mad Men it doesn’t lack bad men: Hector Madden, the alcoholic news anchor (Dominic West oozing sleazy charm); Angus McCain, a shifty Whitehall mandarin ( Read more ...
ronald.bergan
Greece is in economic meltdown. Austerity is hitting most of the population very hard. Businesses are closing down. The amount of homeless has increased. There are strikes and huge anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. What better time to hold a huge film festival?I confess that I was a little surprised that the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival was to take place this year. But then I underestimated the tenacity and pride of the Greeks. They were determined to show the world that it was business as usual. From the images I had seen on television, I imagined a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the crafty and pulsating Secret State harks back to the distant yesteryear of A Very British Coup.Chris Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
No one can resist a story based on declassified truth and in Argo’s case, no one should. The broad strokes of this so-ridiculous-it-must-be-true tale involve six American hostages who escape the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1979. They hole up at the Canadian ambassador’s house while the Iranian military are slowly discovering that some of their hostages are missing and the American government is trying all sorts of idiotic plans to get these hostages back. It’s a pincer movement heading straight for our hapless hostage heroes.The third of director Ben Affleck’s films is, so far, the best Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s been a star-studded attack from leading figures in the arts on the decision by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, to exclude the performing arts from the English Baccalaureate, the planned replacement for the GCSE examination. To the Coalition’s credit, they've also published a National Plan for Music Education, “part of the Government’s aim to ensure that all pupils have rich cultural opportunities alongside their academic and vocational studies”. But this only makes the decision regarding the Ebacc even more disappointing and ill-advised.I’ve been a primary teacher Read more ...
graham.rickson
And so, after 30 years, Chumbawamba are no more. Leeds’s finest issued an eloquent statement on their website back in July, confessing that “the rest of our lives got in the way and we couldn’t commit the time and enthusiasm that the band demanded… being already involved in the stuff of life that wasn’t the band.” Many musicians keep going to embarrassing effect long past their sell-by dates, but this lot are still brilliantly accomplished performers – witty, energetic, engaging and sublimely musical, with a capella harmonies which make the hairs on your neck tingle.Near the end of this final Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.Anthony Baxter’s powerful, unashamedly partisan film pitches a number of principled Davids against this gammon-faced, lizard-eyed, overcombed Goliath. The story begins in 2006, when Trump first set his sights on the Menie Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there’s been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revivals of plays such as Abigail’s Party, all to the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The decade that time forgot has become the decade you can’t escape. But can a documentary about the Westminster politics of 1974-79 really make gripping drama?At first the signs seemed almost positive. After all, the cast includes Philip Glenister - Mr Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - and the live soundtrack Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine. Its cynicism has lately been exposed in George Clooney’s The Ides of March, but that was about a candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination who was too good to be true. What of Republicans lower down the pecking order?Step Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What tremendous sacrifice did Armando Iannucci lay before the comedy Gods in order to be offered the gift of the coalition? Labour post-Blair singularly failed to provide rich pickings for political satire; Gordon Brown and his hangdog posse were too obviously doomed for anyone to bother really sinking their teeth into. In the three years since the last series, however, democracy has served up the omnishambles to end all omnishambles. The question is what will The Thick of It choose to do with it?On the evidence of the opening episode the answer is far from conclusive. Though it has always Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s remarkable how many of the 20th century's most culturally significant popular musicians – from Louis Armstrong to John Lennon – emerged from a childhood defined by lack or absence. As Kevin MacDonald’s epic and enlightening documentary about the life of Robert Nesta Marley illustrates, much of his righteous anger, steely determination and elusive nature stemmed from the dubious legacy of a shady, philandering English father who was white, feckless and an almost entirely ghost-like figure in his son's life.This is a vivid and balanced portrait, neither hagiography nor hatchet job, which Read more ...