Despite his great CV, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin doesn’t quite reach its satirical pretensions.
film review
This year is the 50th anniversary of 1968, the year when revolutionary upsurges occurred all across the globe.
Before touching down on the planet of Canto Bight, Rose looks down forebodingly to tell us that it’s full of the “worst people in the galaxy”. Cut to champagne glasses clinking and a casino full of galactic 1-percenters.
“Only one business in the galaxy can get you this rich,” Rose — a new character in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a mechanic on the Rebel flagship — explains to returning hero Finn as they look around the beachfront resort planet, “selling weapons to the First Order.” She goes on to tell her family’s history: forced to work on a First Order mining colony before it was bled out and blitzed for weapons testing.
The latest film about former British PM Winston Churchill, Darkest Hour, is already being tipped for the Oscars, with Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill at the helm of speculation.
Oldman’s performance is indeed brilliant, but let us be clear. While it is a great piece of cinema that, artistically speaking, deserves many awards, it is also a film that glorifies a certifiably vile man.
Margaret Atwood is blessed and/or cursed with the credit for this year’s go-to feminist analogy. Any time an old white man makes it clear that women are best kept silent and pregnant, someone says that it’s “just like The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, best known as CLR James, was a Trinidadian-born, Black socialist whose work spanned many of the great struggles of the 20th century and across many continents.
A life-long anti-Stalinist, he died in 1989 just as the Soviet Union was beginning to break up – something that brought him joy.
Now his remarkable life has been captured in a new documentary Every Cook Can Govern.
