Michael Wood

Jean Giono​ was closely associated with Provence. He lived there his whole life (1895-1970), scarcely travelling anywhere else. It was the setting of his many novels, and he wrote regularly of local geography and weather. And yet Walter Redfern could say, in 2010, that Giono was ‘not a regional novelist’. It’s an interesting claim and alerts us to all kinds of...

Wes Anderson’s​ new film, Asteroid City, is like a cartoon without the toons. It’s true that the alien who descends (twice) into the picture looks like a drawing of a long-legged human tadpole. Similarly, the desert where much of the film is set looks less like an actual landscape than a sketch of somebody’s idea of such a place, complete with squiggled humps serving as...

Ayellow bus​ takes tourists around a remote island to visit sites associated with a great director’s life and work. Another director takes this location as the setting for a troubled and troubling film about screenwriting. We are watching Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film but one, Bergman Island (2021). Reality serves as a film historian without help from anyone except the...

French moralists​ are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of infinite space; they remind us that hell is other people. Or they make movies. Among the early works of Éric Rohmer are Six Moral Tales. Among his late works are Tales of the Four Seasons, which...

‘And he may be thinking,’ we read in Berta Isla, Javier Marías’s last novel but one, published in Spanish in 2017, ‘that, basically, he belongs to the category of people who don’t see themselves as protagonists, not even of their own story … who discover halfway through that … their story will not merit being told by anyone, or only as a...