To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Horror and homilies in the house that von Trier built
The Danish director’s latest is an uneasy mix of graphic carnage and philosophical musings, says ALAN FRANK
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
The House that Jack Built (18)
Directed by Lars von Trier
“FOR many years I’ve made films about good women, now I did a film about an evil man,” says Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier of his extraordinary and often nausea-inducing art-film shocker.
His scarifying portrait of a serial killer over 20 years in the Pacific north west is replete with all-too-realistic imagery of sadistic slaughters, rather too often awkwardly interspersed, to disconcerting effect, with von Trier’s views on life, death and culture.
We first meet the eponymous Jack, chillingly played by Matt Dillon in the best from of his career, as he undertakes the first of several uncomfortably graphic slaughter sprees that advance the narrative when he gives a woman (Uma Thurman) a lift when her car breaks down, only to smash her face in with a jack that doesn’t work.
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