Films of the Year Archive
After a disappointing year in 2010, this year was considerably better at the movies. There were a number of big disappointments (I’m thinking mainly of Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Gus Van Sant, Steve McQueen and the Coen brothers) and some recently flourishing national cinemas (Taiwan and Germany in particular) were absent [...]

Book Review: Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now - Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, by David Sirota (New York, Ballantine Books $25)

We had a unusually cold spell in the west of Ireland in January 1984 with snow remaining on the ground for a week or [...]

Book Review: The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov (Allen Lane, £14.99 stg)
I started reading this book on the day the people of Tunisia’s unprecedented uprising prompted their president Zine Abedine Ben Ali to flee the country and end his twenty-three-year reign as dictator of the North African state. No sooner had Ben [...]

It wasn’t the greatest of years for cinema, to be honest, and it’s hard to figure why, unless the planets pulled sufficiently at once to put filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo to Rome sufficiently off their game. There were certainly no more bad films than usual out there this year (though certainly more than [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

The top ten for the decade - or, as the more observant will notice, a top 12 - a miscalculation resulted in there being more left at the end than I originally thought. But none of these films could be left out and there’s no obligation to stick too closely to the rules. So here [...]

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki - Finland, 2002)
Kaurismäki narrowly missed out on both the Palme d’Or and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for this film in 2002 but it deservedly made him known to a wider international audience. A man is brutally beaten in a mugging and wakes up with no recollection of [...]

Part 3 of the 100 Best Films of the Decade. Part 1 and Part 2 have already appeared. Only two to go.
The Life Aquatic…With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson – USA, 2004)
People either love or hate Wes Anderson, though I find I have a foot in either camp. I initially detested The Royal Tennenbaums before [...]

The much anticipated second installment of the 100 films of the decade. Part 1 can be found here.
Man on the Moon (Milos Forman – USA, 2000)
Milos Forman followed up his Larry Flynt biopic with one of another American curio, comedian Andy Kaufman. You don’t have to think Kaufman was an undisputed comic genius [...]