Infinite Jest is a kind of geological cross-section of a writer and a literary culture at a moment of major upheaval.
- Jury Professor of English and Language and Literature, Adelaide University
Krasznahorkai’s language is the mad scream of a godless universe at our inexcusable squandering of every good thing given to us by chance.
Utopia was, for Jameson, more than a hope deferred or a crazy workbench covered with unfinished social blueprints. It was a habit of thought we cultivate among ourselves.
Let Us Descend is concerned with the neglected lives of the the poor, the despised, the dark, those barely scraping a living, but cannot capture the collective experience of slavery.
Short-circuiting the language of literary value, permanently wrongfooting the custodians of taste, Gravity’s Rainbow proposes a new way of thinking about what we treasure most.
The obstreperous exclamation mark that holds a bullhorn to the title of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film befits both the mounting clamour of the work itself, and a director who, in 48 years, has yet to discover…
Now that Fargo has become a TV series, the Lebowski Fest has celebrated its 13th annual event, and Inside Llewyn Davis is only a few days away from national DVD release, it’s a good time to ask what the…
He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, The past is something he could see but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. (In the Mood for Love…
Hollywood’s idea of family entertainment these days largely consists in a kind of reassuring condescension. On the one hand, it must persuade us that its “means of production” — the truly staggering resources…
There is an extraordinary scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) in which Bibi Anderson describes to her mute patient Liv Ullmann a group-sex experience she once had on a beach. As Bergman meticulously…
Sixty summers have now passed since one of cinema’s greatest anni mirabiles. The entire decade rears like one long Himalayan chain of artistic eminence, but no year quite matches 1954 for sheer concentrated…
The US film industry works by way of a finely calibrated genre system. Long ago, Hollywood learned how not to shoot in the dark, by tailoring its expensive products to a market that it could divide and…
It is a strange and transitional time in the history of cinema. As the medium itself shifts irreversibly from celluloid to computation, the last generation of true film-makers is gradually, but inevitably…
Each of the arts confers upon the cinema something of its own metier. Dance, its movement. Poetry, its structure. Theatre, its situations. Music, its rhythm. Sculpture, its salience. But painting is the…
The last man standing at the recent Academy Awards was the director/producer of the acclaimed 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen. I for one was happy, for complex reasons, to see him there; not least because…
Once again the Academy has spoken. The roughly 6,000 members of that exclusive industrial club have had their annual votes counted. More members thought 12 Years a Slave a better film than Gravity, and…
American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead in the bathroom of his Greenwich Village Apartment, apparently following a heroin overdose. When we first saw him, bounding up to Marky Mark at…
An unnamed woman alone in an apartment conducts an increasingly panicked conversation on the telephone with the man she loves, but who has abandoned her for another. Her assumed fortitude gradually crumbles…
We are living in extraordinary times. People are using social media to campaign for freedom from their governments, but their ideas are built on a much more powerful medium: literature. Protests have swept…
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