Gaby Wood

At the height​ of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Bitter Christmas, Raúl, a writer-director played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, has a heated argument with his former assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Mónica has worked for Raúl for twenty years, and is, as Raúl puts it, his ‘first and best reader’, but she’s recently left...

Cyanotype of Sphaerococcus coronopifolius from ‘Photographs of British Algae’ (1843).

Like many people​ who keep meaning to get round to things, William Henry Fox Talbot was disheartened to discover, early in 1839, that a rival had claimed credit for something he’d been experimenting with for years. On 7 January, it was announced to the Académie des Sciences...

Bait,​ Mark Jenkin’s first feature film, earned him the Bafta for best newcomer in 2020. Jenkin had been making short films for seventeen years by then. Most of them had been filmed with old cameras of one kind or another – super 8, 16 mm – and some had frames with rounded corners, which placed them somewhere between generations-old home movie and rediscovered newsreel...

In the Brazilian countryside, a man is driving in the wrong direction. It’s 1977, and he’s been on the road for three days. As his yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a remote petrol station, we see what he is about to encounter: a dead body on the ground, crudely covered with cardboard.

Wagner Moura, playing the driver, clocks the body and attempts to reverse before the...

As​ a boy, the Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha spent part of the Second World War in a labour camp in western Ukraine, where he was given a small sketchbook and pencil by a sympathetic soldier. A German-speaking Jew, he had been deported with his family; his father had died on the way. The camp at Mogilev-Podolsky was in a destroyed Transnistrian foundry put to use by Siegfried...