Screen culture

Is today’s Marxism yet another vogue – perhaps in tandem with the current popularity of self-proclaimed democratic socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – destined to be supplanted, in due course, by another, more trendy woke ideology? Or is the Marx of our time a potent, powerful continuation or resurrection of the vision and thought of history’s most dogged revolutionary?

About a quarter of the way through Zona (2012), Geoff Dyer’s book dedicated to describing Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, Stalker,…

‘She tells me she doesn’t think the internet has changed much in the past two decades. We still chat and flirt. It’s just more widespread.’

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern…

It was probably late and we had certainly been drinking. The conversation turned to – guest stars from M.A.S.H.? One-hit…

Madeline Martha Mackenzie, the central character in Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel Big Little Lies, thinks of Pirriwee, the fictional suburb…

Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.The honest thief, the tender murderer . . . Robert Browning On the…

‘In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the air – usually leading to the utterance of the classic line: ‘Do I have to spell it out in words?’ This excellent phrase often comes to mind when reading the criticism devoted to almost every art form: film, painting, music, theatre, TV, sculpture. Because the dominant assumption, operative for a long time now, is that we do need to spell it all out in words – that our responses to creative works are only genuinely articulated, and furthermore legitimated, when we put them into ordered, written, rational form. ‘

The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more complicated sense that the film both relies on and participates in the construction of Wallace as a cultural symbol.