Dredd (3D)
Pete Travis’ work as a TV and film director tends to focus on violent political histories; his films have told the story of the Omagh bombing, the attempted assassination of a US President, and the last days of apartheid in South Africa. Those who have followed Travis’ work may have been surprised at his decision Read More
Ten Drawings and Sketches
How should one review Leonardo Da Vinci?! What could be said about the man or his work that has not been said? What could be said here that did not come across as trite in the extreme? When you first enter the gallery, the churlish impulse is to worry about scale – with only ten Read More
Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership
There is much to be admired about Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, which critically enquires into the intellectual and historical development of our current laws and practices dealing with intellectual property. His guiding thesis, that the public good should limit the duration of any monopoly by artist, inventor or thinker on Read More
Bring up the Bodies
In Bring up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s much anticipated follow-up to the multi-award winning Wolf Hall (2009), we explore one of the most unsettling episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. As the author points out in a note at the end of the book, however, this new novel is not about the Read More
And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night
The memoir And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night is a powerful and compelling account of poet and academic Jack Mapanje’s experiences of Malawian prison and the effect this incarceration had on him and his family. In 1987, Mapanje was imprisoned for over three years by the authoritarian regime of Malawian President Hastings Banda, never once Read More
Swandown
In Swandown, Andrew Kötting, the film’s director, aimed to create “[a] poetic film-diary about landscape and culture.” In that it seems he succeeded, but whether the end-result is worth watching is debatable. The film follows Kötting as he peddles 160 miles along the Thames in a swan pedalo, alongside co-writer Iain Sinclair. Unfortunately, their journey Read More
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Les neiges du Kilimanjaro)
This little French film with a strong social conscience is reminiscent of the work of Marcel Pagnol and Jean Renoir for the fragile and tender portrayals of Southern French life that it offers. In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Marseille-inspired Robert Guédiguian returns to the source of his original creativity. The story is shot on the Read More
The Mill Lavvies
A delicate whiff of carbolic greeted a capacity audience at the Dundee Rep on Saturday night (Sept 1) as Chris Rattray’s The Mill Lavvies returned to the theatre after a ten year absence. Set in the early 1960s, the play follows five male mill workers for whom the “lavvies” provide a respite from the noise Read More
The Flowers of War
In The Flowers of War, director Zhang Yimou revisits the Sino-Japanese war of Nanking to tell the “true life” account of an unlikely group of individuals trying to survive the war in the sanctuary of a church. The film sees Academy Award Winner Christian Bale (The Dark Knight Rises, The Fighter) take the lead role Read More