Category Archives: Culture

Coda review – formulaic yet sweet-natured crowd-pleaser

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A hearing girl with a deaf family is torn between two worlds in a well-intentioned but conventional attempt to win over audiences

There’s an earnest old-fashioned Sundance-ness to writer-director Sian Heder’s broad comedy-drama Coda, the kind of warm-hearted crowd-pleaser that the festival is most widely known for. In any normal year, it would probably have been met with audible approval throughout its premiere. But this isn’t a normal year, with the majority of festival goers watching the film at home, perhaps less pumped up by the thrill of seeing it with a crowd. With or without an audience, it’s a minor film, a little too formulaic at times, a tad too comfortable sticking to a dog-eared playbook, eager to be loved but not really trying hard enough to be remembered.

Related: Sundance 2021: which films might break out this year?

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‘I was appalled to be tarred as misogynist’: Variety critic hits back at Carey Mulligan’s sexism accusations

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Exclusive: Dennis Harvey, the critic whose review of Promising Young Woman prompted outrage from its star and an apology from his editors, has spoken out

Dennis Harvey, the veteran film critic whose review of Promising Young Woman has sparked a furore across the industry, has hit back at accusations of misogyny amid calls for Variety to fire him.

Harvey’s review was published more than a year ago, following the film’s premiere at the Sundance film festival. Largely positive, it called Mulligan’s performance “skilful, entertaining and challenging” while also querying the central casting. While “a fine actress”, wrote Harvey, Mulligan “seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale”.

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‘Alarmingly sexist’: Variety review boosts calls for more diverse film critics

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Male writer’s comments on Carey Mulligan’s looks said to highlight ‘double standards’ in industry

Film criticism is facing renewed condemnation over a lack of diversity after a review deemed by many – including its subject – to be alarmingly sexist.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Carey Mulligan, who was judged by the veteran Variety reviewer Dennis Harvey to be insufficiently attractive to convince in her latest role.

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Ralph Fiennes’s 20 best film performances – ranked!

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As his new film The Dig comes to Netflix, we take a deep dive into Fiennes’s career – from Quiz Show and The English Patient to In Bruges and The Lego Batman Movie

This version of Dickens’s Great Expectations, scripted by David Nicholls, was maybe not groundbreaking but was watchable and featured Ralph Fiennes as the convict Magwitch. He is seen first leaping out and scaring Pip in the churchyard with a convict’s number-one cut and mud all over his face, and later with longish hair, clean-shaven in a mysterious, new respectable guise. It’s a transformation that should perhaps have given Fiennes more of a performing showcase.

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Doe-eyed Kristen Stewart might just take the crown as Princess Diana

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In a highly competitive field, the American actor has perfected the put-upon princess look for Spencer, the latest royal biopic

Some films have to work harder than others to get bums on seats. Some can charm audiences with big stars, or the lure of a continuing franchise, or the promise of a scene where King Kong takes a swing at Godzilla like he’s half-cut in a Wetherspoons car park. And then, right at the other end of the scale, is Spencer.

Make no mistake, Spencer will have to be brilliant to make people go and see it. Better than brilliant, even. It will have to be the perfect movie; entertaining and fun and moving and so technically accomplished that film historians will come to view it as the moment that cinema entered a new epoch. Anything less than that and Spencer is done for.

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‘They said I wasn’t hot enough’: Carey Mulligan hits out again at magazine review

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Variety review of black comedy Promising Young Woman prompts actor to speak out on industry’s institutionalised sexism

Carey Mulligan has said she was alarmed after a major publication ran a review of her new film questioning whether she was attractive enough for the role.

Related: Variety's apology to Carey Mulligan shows that the critic's ivory tower is toppling | Peter Bradshaw

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‘My Antifa Lover’: I read the weirdest Trump-era erotica so you don’t have to

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The Trump years were a powerful creative muse for self-published erotic and romance literature. We review four of the most memorable

If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to, say, have a sexual encounter with Mike Pence, Kindle has you covered.

In recent years, Amazon’s e-books market has nurtured a flourishing cottage industry of self-published romance and erotic literature – and the Trump years have inspired many to put pen to paper. The most successful authors (most write under pseudonyms) are known for their prolific publication, thesaurus-aided descriptions of the human anatomy, and responsiveness to current events.

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‘Black resistance endured’: paying tribute to civil war soldiers of color

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In a new book, the often under-appreciated contribution that black soldiers made during the civil war is brought to light with a trove of unseen photos

A classic tintype photo from the 19th century showing a civil war soldier, whose garments are hand-colored in gold paint. The soldier, crowned by a gold frame, looks forward, holding a gun over his chest.

But rather than just any war portrait, it’s part of the overlooked history of African American soldiers who fought during the period. This one and more are featured in a new book called The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship.

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Napoleon’s manuscript on victory at Battle of Austerlitz goes on sale

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Dictated account of military success in 1805 contains several corrections made by the exiled French leader

Napoleon Bonaparte’s account of his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, dictated and annotated during his exile on the island of St Helena, has gone on sale in Paris for €1m (£880,000).

The description of the battle, the strategy behind which is still taught in military schools, is viewed by historians as evidence of Napoleon’s desire to record his hour of glory for posterity after his 1815 humiliation at Waterloo and subsequent capture by the British.

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‘I’m flabbergasted’: Monique Roffey on women, whiteness and winning the Costa

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The Mermaid of Black Conch’s author explains why she expected ‘a quiet life’ for the formally daring, magical realist novel that has been declared book of the year

After two decades of splashing around in the shallows of success, Monique Roffey was taking no chances with The Mermaid of Black Conch. The novel, which won the Costa book of the year award on Tuesday, is written in a Creole English and uses a patchwork of forms, from poetry to journal entries and an omniscient narrator, and “employs magical realism to the max”. Even its title was against it, she realised. “You’re either going to read a novel about a mermaid or you aren’t.”

Any one of these, she says, would scare away most publishers. So when one, the independent Peepal Tree Press, did bite, she launched a crowdfunder to enable her to hire her own publicist. It’s a mark of the esteem in which the 55-year-old author and university lecturer is held by those familiar with her work that 116 people chipped in, raising £4,500 within a month. Then, two weeks before the novel was due to be published, the UK went into lockdown, shutting bookshops and forcing the cancellation of a tour that was particularly important for a writer who has always swum between two continents and two cultures.

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Lupin’s Omar Sy: ‘We wanted to show what the French are capable of’

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The actor stars in Netflix’s biggest French-language hit as a gentleman thief. He and the director, Louis Leterrier, explain how the drama drew in 70 million fans worldwide

“We wanted to show what the French were capable of in terms of making a series, but frankly we didn’t expect it to do what it has.” Omar Sy, the star of the latest Netflix smash hit, Lupin, is speaking over the phone from Senegal. The line between London and Dakar isn’t great, but the charm that has helped his slick, charismatic character – a modern day gentleman thief – connect with audiences around the world is still evident.

Streaming services have been the dominant source of cultural output in the past year, so the chances are that you have at least heard of Lupin, even if you haven’t got round to bingeing Netflix’s biggest French language hit to date. Ranking in the Top 10 on the platform in multiple countries – climbing to No 2 in the UK and the US – as well as being projected to have reached 70 million households in the first month of streaming, Lupin is a family-friendly show – perhaps one of the elements that has given it an edge over the likes of Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gambit.

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Bridgerton inspires rise in demand for classical pop song covers

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Netflix drama’s use of string versions of Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish hits has tripled streaming figures for Vitamin String Quartet

The success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has produced some unexpected trends, such as huge increases in people searching online for Regency fashion items including corsets. But the latest is a dramatic rise in the number of people streaming classical cover versions of contemporary pop songs.

Vitamin String Quartet, the group that provide most of the classical versions of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Maroon 5 songs in the modernised costume drama, have had a 350% increase in the number of people streaming their work since the show was released in December.

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I enjoyed researching the bloody history of childbirth – then I had a baby | Anna North

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My new novel is about a midwife’s daughter in the old American west. The peril pregnant women underwent, then and now, became all too vivid once I became a parent

Childbirth in the 19th century was a dangerous affair. Women routinely came down with puerperal fever, an infection of the uterus that could lead to sepsis and death. Others suffered a postpartum haemorrhage: heavy bleeding that, if not stopped, could also claim their lives. Some experienced eclampsia, a condition in which skyrocketing blood pressure could cause fatal seizures. In 1900, six to nine women died for every 1,000 births, more than 30 times the rate today.

I learned these facts when I started researching my latest novel, Outlawed, an alternate history following a midwife’s daughter on the run across the American west in 1894. I needed a working understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology of the era to give it verisimilitude. So I read about the history of the C-section, which, at least in Europe, was generally a fatal procedure until about the 1880s, though there are reports of women surviving it as early as the second century CE. I learned about the discovery of egg cells, which was the subject of heated debate in the 1670s between the Dutch doctor Reinier de Graaf (who demonstrated their existence by dissecting rabbits shortly after mating) and his rival Jan Swammerdam (who liked to travel with a human uterus and other “items of genital anatomy”). I studied the composition of early baby formula, which, in 16th and 17th-century Europe, often consisted of bread soaked in milk, fed to infants from a “pap boat” that was unfortunately hard to clean and prone to accumulating bacteria.

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Kyrgyzstan ballads, Okinawan folk, Ugandan hymns … the album rewriting global music history

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Excavated Shellac rejects the western canon of pop, rock, jazz, classical and more to champion 78rpm gems from overlooked corners of the world – ‘an alternate universe’, according to the man behind it

Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.

These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording. This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.

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The Capote Tapes: inside the scandal ignited by Truman’s explosive final novel

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He partied with high society America but caused outrage when he spilled their secrets. Ebs Burnough talks us through his new film about Answered Prayers – the ‘smart, salacious’ novel Capote never finished

When Truman Capote died in 1984, he left the remains of a novel he had been hatching for nearly two decades, and talking about for almost as long. Answered Prayers, the story of a budding writer screwing his way through polite society, was intended to be Capote’s most explosive achievement. He likened it to a deadly weapon. “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet,” he told People magazine. “And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen – wham!” Having bragged about the book for years, all he had to do now was write it.

A contract was signed in 1966, but advance chapters published in Esquire magazine nine years later proved to be far below the standard of his defining successes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. There was a cost to his social reputation as well as his literary one. As soon as the socialites and wealthy wives with whom he had mingled happily for years – including Slim Keith, Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt, whom he called his “swans” – saw how casually he had spilled their most intimate secrets, those friendships were dead. Capote hadn’t bitten the hand that fed him. He’d gnawed it off at the wrist.

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‘Cancer made me pull my life together’: Zandra Rhodes on fun, fashion and Freddie Mercury

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One of Britain’s greatest designers, she has dressed everyone from Princess Diana to Diana Ross. She discusses punk, pink hair and staying creative after serious illness

Zandra Rhodes was doing a yoga session with a friend in the early weeks of the pandemic when she realised that something was wrong. “It’s a funny story,” she says. “We were lying on our lilac mats in my rainbow penthouse, and I was breathing deeply – and my stomach felt full. And I thought, why is it full? I haven’t had a meal today.”

It turned out she had a tumour. “It was in the bile [duct] and going into whatever’s near it,” she says, vaguely. Treatment involved weeks travelling across a locked-down London for chemotherapy, followed by an immunotherapy regime that she is still on, even though she is happy to say that the tumour is in full remission. Her first thought after diagnosis was “to get my will in order with a power of attorney that included a do-not-resuscitate order. I was very lucky because I had no pain whatsoever. I just got very tired while I was having the chemo.”

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Ageing Pompidou Centre in Paris to close for four years for renovation

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French culture minister says it will be quicker and cheaper to close the cultural landmark entirely

The Pompidou Centre, one of Paris’s top cultural attractions and home to Europe’s biggest modern art collection, is to close from 2023 for four years of renovations, France’s culture minister has said.

Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977 and is showing visible signs of ageing.

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Godzilla vs Kong: the big dumb action movie we’ve been waiting for?

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The trailer for the monster match-up promises bad dialogue and convoluted mythology, but also two giant creatures fighting until the death

We can all agree that the restrictions brought about by Covid have reinforced all the things we previously took for granted. Some miss their loved ones. Some miss the pulsating mass of warm strangers on an unplanned night out. Me? It turns out that I apparently miss the sight of a massive gorilla punching a radioactive sea monster right in the middle of its dumb face.

Related: Charlie Cox's Daredevil would be a welcome addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe

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Mural in Madrid that celebrates women pitched into Spain’s culture wars

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Far-right Vox party leads efforts to erase 60-metre artwork it claims contains ‘political message’

A mural in Madrid celebrating a diverse array of women from Nina Simone and Rosa Parks to Frida Kahlo and the Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko has become the latest front in Spain’s culture war after the far-right Vox party led efforts to have it removed because of its “political message”.

The 60-metre (197ft) mural, which bears the slogan “Your ability doesn’t depend on your gender”, was commissioned by the local council in the Ciudad Lineal neighbourhood and painted on the wall outside a sports centre in 2018.

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