Ten modest films

Ten and a bit years ago I contributed for the first time to the venerable Sight and Sound once-every-ten-years poll of the greatest films. The poll has been running since 1952. The top choice of the sixty-three critics who contributed was Ladri di biciclette, or Bicycle Thieves (Italy 1948). From 1962 to 2002 the poll-topperRead More

Looking up to the light

To the cinema to see a film about cinema. Is there any art form, any medium, that has been quite so sentimental about itself as cinema? There is nostalgia in the understanding of every art form or medium which has transformed through time, but cinema’s forlornness seems particular to itself. It is summed up byRead More

Miniatures

The best-selling song in Britain in 2022 was Harry Styles’s ‘As It Was’. It runs for two minutes and 47 seconds. In a recent piece in iNews, Adam Sherwin argues that that popular music is getting shorter because of the attention spans of the TikTok generation. In the mobile world, a song needs to captureRead More