Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

If this is how both sides in America have decided to do politics in the age of Trump, there’s not much point finding fault, is there?

Maybe I’m getting too old to take a continual exposure to our morally radioactive popular culture. The experience of watching Whipped, written and directed by Peter M. Cohen, produced on me the same effect that the sight of Poor Tom o’Bedlam had on the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear: “I’th’ last night’s storm I…

When Shakespeare decided to put a trio of witches into Macbeth he knew that their very presence would suggest to his audience something fearful beyond imagining. They were a kind of algebraic symbol for the unknown quantity of evil which the play, in more realistic fashion, attempted to solve for. Nowadays, the presence of witches…

For Love of the Game, starring Kevin Costner as Billy Chapel, an aging pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who hopes to end his career with a perfect game, turns out to be yet another Costnerian marathon of mawkishness and self indulgence. Oddly for a film that is ostensibly about a guy who has to learn…

A child’s-eye view, and therefore a rather amusing treatment, of social pathologies that are, in reality, not at all amusing

A farrago of fake blood, movie pastiche and historical nonsense whose rapturous critical reception tells you all you need to know about the state of the culture