An article from the March 2015 issue of Sight & Sound about the recent rise in visibility of older LGBT characters in film
Meet Ernst and Röbi, real-life stars of gay-rights docudrama The Circle
I’ve been a bit obsessed this year with the idea of a ‘backward turn’ in LGBTQ cinema – a spike in interest in stories about the past, expressed through attention to period dramas, documentaries about historic subjects and greater screen presence for older LGBTQ people. (Here’s the Guardian piece where I set the idea out.) […]
Pride review for Sight & Sound
This review of Pride, released today in the UK, appears in the October 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. I recently argued in the Guardian that LGBT cinema is currently undergoing something of a ‘backward turn’: an increasingly sizeable body of work has emerged over recent years comprising films that could be considered retrospective in […]
Why isn’t today’s cabaret more overtly political?
In a post yesterday, I suggested that the direct political engagement with which we still associate Brecht, Weill and Weimar cabaret in general is harder to find on the current cabaret scene, even though we live in a world of war, division, oppression, inequality and exploitation scarcely less outrageous than that of the interwar period. […]
The dog ate my homework
It’s been more than a month since I lasted posted on here. This ends now! Not that I’ve been idle. Over the past month or two, I’ve been keeping BURN‘s monthly residency at Hackney Attic going (that’s the platform for moving-image work by cabaret artists I started in 2010), and doing a one-off mini-BURN […]
A bit of a whirl
Dear me, it’s been way too long since I was on here. I know it’s a cliché about blogs that you start enthusiastically and then let them tail off, and in that respect I seem to have become a cliché pretty quickly. My excuse for such negligence is that I’ve been doing lots of other […]
Stranger by the Lake Guardian feature and S&S review
Just a little heads up about a couple of pieces I wrote related to Alain Guiraudie’s terrific, unsettling thriller Stranger by the Lake, a naturalistic and intoxicating tale of sex and murder at a French lakeside cruising spot that was released in the UK this weekend. For Sight & Sound, I reviewed it as one […]
Always crashing on the same couch – Inside Llewyn Davis review
J.M. Tyree and I reviewed the Coen brothers’ latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, for the February 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. Josh and I co-wrote the BFI Film Classic on The Big Lebowski in 2007 and have covered a bunch of Coen pictures for S&S since then. (Here’s our take on No Country for […]
