This once-famous name may be unfamiliar to millennials, but even those with the remotest interest in film should discover him and his astounding body of work. Among the top directors who have credited him as a direct influence on their work: Ingmar Bergman (who described him as “the best director in the world”), Federico Fellini, […]
When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983’s The Final Cut, the remaining members had good reason to assume the band was truly, as Waters’ proclaimed, “a spent force.” After releasing solo projects in the next few years, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright soon discovered they would never achieve as individuals what they did […]
In the fall of 1966, during a stretch of nine weeks away from the Beatles, John Lennon wrote a song. He was in rural Spain at the time, on the set of a movie called How I Won the War, but the lyrics cast back to an icon of his boyhood in Liverpool: the Strawberry […]
When Martin Scorsese puts away his strutting cocks – his raging bulls, comedy kings and Wall Street wolves – the results can be astounding. This quieter, lesser-seen director is the one who gave us ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ (1988), the exquisite period piece ‘The Age of Innocence’ (1993) and now ‘Silence’, a furiously alive and concentrated parable about […]
“Violence only benefits those who have nothing to lose.” – Jean Paul Sartre The great pianist virtuoso Duke Ellington once said that, “the masters, frightened by the silence of their slaves, will order them to sing, so as not to give them an opportunity to think and forge a plan of revenge and liberation”. A […]
Feelings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall roughly into one of two camps: the religiously reverent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As popular examples of the former, we have the many thousand celebrants of Bloomsday—June 16th, the date on which the novel is set in 1904. These revelries approach the level of saints’ days, with re-enactments […]
Six months ago Radiohead released the ninth album of their storied 31 year career. As ever, they didn’t disappoint. A sprawling, emotional masterpiece, A Moon Shaped Pool is filled to the brim with soaring ballads and layered, experimental rock songs. It’s their best since 2007’s In Rainbows. What’s even more interesting though is what’s on it. […]
When we invoke the names of famous artists of the past, we refer to their most hallowed work—Orson Welles simultaneously means Citizen Kane, for example, or War of the Worlds, and H.G. Wells means The Time Machine or… War of the Words. It happens that when these two artists got together in 1940, they found that […]