Culture
Bruce Springsteen Film. The Boss and the Biopic Problem
By Yulia Tulegenova, Film critic We have a Bruce Springsteen film. Finally. For years, the musical biopic has been churning out these big, glossy cradle-to-grave epics, ticking off the greatest hits and the personal tragedies like items on a shopping list. But Springsteen always felt… different. Too complex, too real, for that kind of treatment.…
The House That Jack Built, Lars von Trier's Film Review.
By Yulia Tulegenova Another Lars von Trier film lands. And, as always, it doesn’t so much land as crash, leaving a crater. This one’s called The House That Jack Built. On the surface, it’s a film about a serial killer. We’ve all seen films about serial killers. The genre is exhausted. At first, you think, here…
Ace Frehley. The Real Fire in the Machine
By Anna Zhila Ace Frehley is gone. The Spaceman. And the first thing you think of, of course, is the makeup. The silver stars, the platform boots, the guitar that shoots rockets. The whole ridiculous, brilliant pantomime of it all. Kiss. It was a cartoon, a brand, a lunchbox, before it was ever really a…
The Hunger at the End of Things
By Anna Zhila So the news came through about Baek Se-hee. And immediately, you think of the title of her book. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Even now, it’s a perfect sentence. A perfect, heartbreaking, and darkly funny summary of a particular kind of modern despair. The kind where the…
America’s Fever Dream on Film
By Yulia Tulegenova So, it’s one of those funny coincidences. The kind that doesn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Two of the most interesting filmmakers in America, Ari Aster and Paul Thomas Anderson, both release major films within weeks of each other. And both films, in their own strange, roundabout ways, are about the…
We Keep Getting Frankenstein Wrong
By Yulia Tulegenova Another Frankenstein is upon us. Guillermo del Toro’s version this time, which means it will be beautiful, and sad, and full of empathy for the monster. Which is a good thing. A necessary corrective, even. Because for two hundred years, we’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about Frankenstein. The word itself has become…
Paris Fashion Week 2025. The Other Show Outside The Show
By Anna Zhila The circus leaves town. Another Paris Fashion Week is done. And we’re left with the after-images. Thousands of them. A digital blizzard of perfectly lit, perfectly posed, perfectly edited pictures of clothes walking down a runway. That’s the official story. But what if that’s not the story at all? What if the…
The Ghost In The Children’s Book
By Yulia Tulegenova The Spy Dog books are being pulled from school libraries. Spy Pups and Spy Cat, too. A whole series of perfectly harmless kids' books, the kind you see piled up in The Works for a couple of quid, featuring cute animals with gadgets solving crimes. And now they’re being treated like contraband.…
The Saint John We Invented
By Anna Zhila John Lennon would have been 85 this week. And you know what that means. The photos will be doing the rounds again. The round glasses, the long hair, the white piano. Saint John of the Peace and Love movement. The working-class hero, the martyr. The man who just wanted to give peace…
A Long Overdue Look At Nigeria
By Yulia Tulegenova So the Tate has discovered Nigeria. There’s a big, serious show on at the moment. “Nigerian Modernism.” It’s full of incredible work, over 250 pieces from the 1940s through to the 80s. The kind of show that makes you feel the weight of the institution, the grand statement being made. And the…
What Is The Matt Damon Thing?
By Anna Zhila Someone asked me the other day about Matt Damon. Not about a specific film, just… about him. And I realised it’s a surprisingly tricky question. What is the Matt Damon ‘thing’? He’s been one of the biggest movie stars in the world for what, twenty-five years? But when you picture him, what…
Cooling an Empire: A Close Reading of Julia Zolotova’s Eastern Empire
By Irma Ratiani, literary critic, Professor of Comparative Literature, Tbilisi State University, Georgia This review is an independent assessment. No fee or editorial input was accepted from the author or publisher. Eastern Empire (hereafter “EE”) tells the story of Marina, from Russia and Li Jing, from China. They meet as students in Beijing and later…
Expanding the Boundaries of Portraiture: Assaya’s “Open Your Eyes”
By Lee Sharrock About the Author. Lee Sharrock is an internationally recognised curator, art critic and communications consultant based in London. She began her career as Global Creative PR Director at Saatchi Gallery and later served as Head of Global Creative PR for Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide. Sharrock contributes expert analysis on global art and…
The Life of a Showgirl Review: The Songs Are Just Fine
A review of Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl. Strip away the podcast announcement, the cinema release and the records, and what remains is merely fine.
'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' Film - 50 Years of Absolute Pleasure
By Yulia Tulegenova It began not with a bang, but with a box-office whimper. Fifty years ago, a film landed in British cinemas, flickered briefly, and then all but vanished. It was greeted by critical shrugs and empty seats, dismissed by one reviewer as "campy trash" (absolutely rubbish) and another as a sparkle-less rehash of…
