Mean Streets, Directed by Martin Scorsese
By Dan Schneider There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that…
By Dan Schneider There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s seminal 1973 film, Mean Streets, that is key to understanding not only the characters that…
By Brenda Stones This debut novel comes loaded with accolades; already the book covers and the author’s websites are stashed with tributes: the next Steinbeck,…
By Luke Douglas-Home You may have seen it at one of the many documentary festivals it has wowed, in Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham or Toronto. You…
By Jason Smith ‘Fish and chips are indigestible, expensive and unwholesome’. Eating them causes secondary poverty, which arises from the incompetent and immoral misapplication of…
By David Birch The tagline of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights—‘Love is a force of nature’—is almost too good. As a selling-point, it is best not…
By Timandra Harkness It is a glorious film, but you could not make it now. And that is not just my opinion. My preview screening…
By Cheryl Hudson My Name is Khan broke global box office records as the largest grossing Bollywood movie worldwide in its opening weekend, including in…
By Matt Trueman Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet is a marked man; most definitely ‘the observed of all observers’. The Elsinore he inhabits is a surveillance state.…
By Jo Caird 2008 was the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, the book that is widely regarded as the first African…
By Dolan Cummings Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sees Lewis Carroll’s Alice returning to ‘Underland’ at the age of 19, falling down a hole in…
By Mike Jakeman Ilustrado, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the debut novel by a young Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco, begins with…
By Sarah Boyes Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is a notoriously popular composer. Popular, in terms of sheer numbers of admirers during his lifetime and enduring resonance…
By Miriam Gillinson A white mist unfurls onstage. Two armies filter forward—it is hard to make them out through the fog—and begin to mime a…
By Dennis Hayes Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air is one of those rare films that deals with contemporary working life. It focuses on the…
By Angelica Michelis The final part of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy starts exactly where the second volume has finished: Lisbeth Salander, the plucky and unusual heroine…
By Mark Carrigan Given the likelihood that its director Roman Polanski may never make another film, it is difficult not to approach The Ghost Writer…
By Tara McCormack The other day on the train, I came across a copy of the Daily Express. It is not a paper I normally…
By Jane Turner The Importance of Being Earnest was the first and is also sadly, the last play to be performed in the basement of…
By Chris Bickerton Perry Anderson’s The New Old World is a welcome addition to the many books published in recent years on the European Union…
By Matt Trueman Imagine if you could bathe in Macbeth. Or cut it into lines and snort it. What about painting your house Macbeth? ‘OK,’…