RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Mind games from a rapidly waning empire
ANGUS REID takes issue with the pernicious imperial sabre-rattling purveyed by a dying empire in the latest edition of Top Gun
Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell
[IMDb]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
THE sheer scale of Top Gun is breathtaking. By this I don’t mean the military hardware eagerly lent to Tom Cruise, but the way it saturates global cinema. You don’t have much choice but Top Gun if you want to watch a film for the next month.
There are 18 screenings a day at my local cinema, and it is showing in at least 24,000 cinemas simultaneously around the world. It would be absurd to take its success at the box office as a mark of quality when it is guaranteed.
The critical response, including in this paper, is overwhelmingly positive, and the audience is already in the millions. But how much of that audience have awareness of the politics that is driving the show?
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