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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Tabu caused a stir among critics when it was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival back in February. The film opens with an offbeat prologue. A melancholic Portuguese explorer, heartbroken after the loss of a lover and haunted by her ghostly image, journeys through Africa and appears to commit suicide by feeding himself to Read More
The instant the lights come down, we are drawn into the dark world of the jute mills. Through a translucent curtain, the women of Dundee appear to be working at the spinning and the winding, the weaving and the carding. All the time, the mesmeric clackity-clacking of the looms, and the sporadic wailing of the Read More