Michael Wood

The unlived life​ is a great modern theme. Not reality’s disappointments, but reality itself as a form of evasion, the wrong road taken. When we read or hear the word ‘living’, its double meaning occurs to us, as though murmured by a weary old friend. ‘Living and partly living.’ ‘You can’t call that living.’ ‘I must change my life so...

In​ September 1917, having just discovered he had tuberculosis, Franz Kafka took a break from his work at an insurance company in Prague and spent eight months with his sister Ottla in the village of Zürau, now called Siřem. He also seemed to be taking a break from writing, or at least from the writing he was supposed to be doing. In fact, he was leading what Reiner Stach calls...

The plot summaries​ for Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave refer to a man being found dead at the foot of a mountain. This is correct, but it isn’t quite what it looks like on screen. There’s a body, a police team is investigating, and we are in a mountainous area. But the rock the man fell or was pushed from looks like a theme park invention. This effect is enhanced when...

At the beginning​ we hear voices, part of a stand-up routine perhaps – later we learn that they’re from a television show. One of them says: ‘You’d think a man who could send a rocket into space would be able to manage a halfway decent birthday present.’ The same voice comments after a short pause, ‘Nope.’ Jordan Peele’s third feature film...

The song​  we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by the time the movie’s plot gets rolling it sounds more like a fragile wish than any sort of programme. ‘Fate is a name for my bad luck,’ a leading character says. Or his good luck. At...