Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
The story is old and always violent, and in a favourite modern version acquires a dark particular twist. The king must die but he also has to collude with, even create his assassin. Early on in Bradley Cooper’s first film as a director, a new rendering of A Star Is Born, Cooper himself, playing a crumbling rock/country legend, sings a weary, winsome number about changing styles,...
Spike Lee , as befits a film school graduate, is a master of montage. His cuts and juxtapositions often say more than his dialogue does, perhaps more than any dialogue could. This is especially marked in BlacKkKlansman, which has been widely hailed as Lee’s return to form after a spell in the movie wilderness.
The film opens with a shot of a railway yard littered with bodies,...
Did someone say familiarity breeds contempt? In the cinema it often breeds attraction and money. The film series called Mission Impossible began in 1996, picking up from a television show that ran from 1966 to 1973 (171 episodes), and the new, sixth movie (Mission Impossible: Fallout) had as of 15 August made $458 million worldwide (it cost $178 million to make).
Of course there have been...
In 1968, when not too many people outside Portugal had heard of Fernando Pessoa, now regarded as one of the great Modernist poets, the linguist Roman Jakobson, in collaboration with Luciana Stegagno-Picchio, wrote an essay centring on Pessoa’s use of oxymorons. The piece was a complex formal study of a poem from Mensagem (1934), the single volume of verse Pessoa published in...
Pandora’s Box , G.W. Pabst’s great silent film from 1929, is a classic portrait of the femme fatale. Or is it? The new print showing at the BFI allows us to think again, and the film now seems rather sceptical about fate, and much devoted to the ideas of chance and greed and obsession.
The old story of Pandora’s box, an urn apparently until its Greek turned into Latin,...
Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into...
Michael Wood talks to Adam Shatz about critical theory, its origins, developments and various diversions, and where it stands today.
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Michael Wood reads his take on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra.
O n the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is...
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment.
I don’t believe in astrology, but I also know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a...
Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...
Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a...
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