Michael Wood

Paul Celan​ was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania,...

If​ you don’t especially like car crashes, exploding buildings and the overuse of assault weapons, you may want to stay away from the cinema for a while. Well, you could have started to stay away even before the pandemic, because it often seemed there was nothing else to see, whether the noise and violence involved superheroes or just special agents in suits. But let’s be fair....

Ousmane​ Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), now available in a restored print, was the first full-length feature film whose characters speak an African language. Small bits of French appear, but Wolof is heard all the time. And the title offers a good example of a kind of colonisation in reverse, being a Senegalese adaptation of the French term for money-order: mandat de...

The​ first thing that dies in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (which will be in cinemas from 17 May) is a town called Empire, in Nevada. The life-supporting sheetrock plant shuts down, the people leave, even the zip code vanishes. A woman called Fern, played by Frances McDormand, takes up residence in a van. She spends a Christmas season working at an Amazon warehouse, and hopes for...

Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there...