Cultural Capital: film

Given Hollywood's relative historic disregard for the Bosnian war, Angelina Jolie's directorial debut was always going to pique the interests of ethnic groups in the Balkan region and critics alike.

In the Land of Blood and Honey is a drama set against the bloody backdrop of 1990s ex-Yugoslavia. The Golden Globe-nominated project charts the ambiguous relationship between Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosniak painter, and Danijel (Goran Kostić), a Serb soldier. It ... read more

I like Kevin Smith. Not his films, necessarily (with the exception of the ones for which most people retain a residual fondness -- Clerks and Chasing Amy). But I have a lot of time for him. He's a genuinely riotous comic speaker who can be astonishingly dexterous with even the largest audience in the most cavernous venue, and he's also a stimulating thinker beneath that laddish exterior. He talks a ... read more

There's blood on the escritoires over at the Poetry Society. It has been in turmoil for some weeks following multiple resignations, and now there is the suspension of public funds by the Arts Council to contend with -- all in the wake of what the Independent described as a "power struggle" between its former director and the editor of Poetry Review.

What, you may ask, ... read more

It's absurd that the US sketch show Saturday Night Live has never had a continuous, dependable showing in the UK despite the talent farm it has proved itself to be over nearly four decades. (You know the roll-call by now: John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Mike Myers, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Chris Rock and Tina Fey among others.)

Sky Arts is read more

Is there anything left for a documentary film to say about the financial crisis after Inside Job, Capitalism: a Love Story and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room? David Sington's The Flaw proves that there is.

The picture draws its title from the words of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who told the US Congressional Committee: "I have found a flaw in the model ... read more

I should begin by warning readers of a sensitive disposition that this blog post contains spoilers pertaining to the movie Win Win, and some strong language, as well as brief, positive remarks about the HBO television series The Wire, which has never knowingly been under-praised.

Many screenwriters include in their work a single line or speech that doubles as a mission statement or a setting-out of the thematic stall. In the ... read more

I've never been much of an industry-watcher, which is why Charles Gant's box-office digest in Sight & Sound magazine, and online at the Guardian, is so valuable. As well as being a witty read, there's the secondary but entirely pleasant sensation that someone else is doing my homework for me; Gant gets on with all the number-crunching so that this two-time maths flunkee doesn't have ... read more

Taxi Driver returns to cinema screens this week, though it feels like it's never been away. In the 35 years since the film's release, its key personnel -- director Martin Scorsese, writer Paul Schrader, actors Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel -- have hardly been short of work, yet nothing any of them has done has inspired quite the same fanatical response.

Lonely young men still pin the film's ... read more

There is so much to relish Joe Wright's film Hanna, which is part comic thriller, part fairy tale and part irresistible "What If?" (as in: "What if Rainer Werner Fassbinder had designed a big-budget Hollywood action movie?").

The movie is named after its teenage heroine (Saoirse Ronan), who has been raised as a single-minded killer by her father (Eric Bana) in a remote snowy wilderness. With ... read more

One of the qualities I love about cinema is its assertiveness: it's so much harder to overrule or ignore a film when it's on a cinema screen, whether that screen is in the Grand Palais in Cannes or the Slough Cineworld, than when it's on television, laptop or iPod. I was impressed when I watched Chronicle of Protest, the omnibus edition of Michael Chanan's attentive read more

Fictional films set in Iraq or Afghanistan have had a notoriously unfavourable commercial reception. Fortunately that hasn't deterred documentary makers from exploring the same territory, the budgets being so much smaller, the box-office expectations modest to negligible.

There's another reason why documentary is better suited to the subject: its immediacy, not just in visual terms, but in its capacity to reach the screen more quickly without the obstacle course of studio ... read more

There's a special frisson when a performer renowned for comedy goes straight. I didn't feel it when the stand-up comic John Bishop popped up as the hero's murdered chum in the flashback scenes during Ken Loach's Route Irish, but that's only because a mixture of luck and careful planning has enabled me to avoid that species of TV comedy show on which Bishop has appeared ... read more