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“... rather than the beneficiaries of social change, by the working class rather than the thrusting young professionals. Yet in this economic twilight, not even the fortunate can afford to be sanguine about the future of civility in public places. If anxiety about crime is a displaced expression of a more general historical pessimism about the future of civic ...”

“... they have been beaten up? One of Fleur de Lys’s specialities is plastic surgery which converts young women into copies of contemporary actresses, Lana Turner, Veronica Lake and others, so that the clients can screw celebrity simulacra. What the film gives us is better than that: an appearance which is the reality. Kim Basinger looks just like Kim ...”

“... in Jojo Rabbit is a strangely theoretical thing. When Johannes, still an eager young Nazi, begins a fraught friendship with the Jewish girl his mother is hiding, he asks her to draw for him the place where Jews live. She draws a picture of his head, and writes the word Dummkopf underneath. She is right. As Sartre said long ago, the Jews of ...”

“... to. She decides to punish him by embarrassing him. She will wear a red dress to a ball where all young ladies are supposed to wear white. Dillard, stubborn in his way, takes her to the ball, forces her stay longer than she wants to and to dance emphatically round the floor with him, making them the only persons still moving in a shocked staring crowd. Then ...”

“... though we keep suspecting him we don’t suspect him for long, and we are right not to. Nick has a young mistress, his marriage was falling apart, he drinks too much, and he is still behaving in a way that doesn’t endear him to anyone, but he isn’t a murderer. Cary Grant wasn’t planning to murder Joan Fontaine either, although Hitchcock manages not to ...”

“... who looks like a longer, leaner version of Groucho Marx, reports. He can see the novel, a young woman, can’t quite see her face. Then she moves and he sees it’s Sullavan. He tells Stewart the woman is good-looking, and resembles Sullavan – that is, Miss Novak from the shop. Stewarts gets impatient and wonders why Bressart is talking about Miss ...”

“... every contradictory aspect, that you keep forgetting what’s wrong with the writing) and a busy young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) who gets herself into all kinds of trouble. The very word ‘intern’ will give you a clue as to the kind of trouble this is, for her and for others, and the film rather clunkily underlines this suggestion – boys will be ...”

“... who have committed suicide – and elsewhere in the movie we see him taking calls from a desperate young man ready to do the same – and says he wants to end these needless deaths, to abolish the ubiquitous pressure towards guilt and hiding. What’s moving and powerful here is not the slightly saintly flavour of Milk’s stance – he must be as ambitious as ...”

“... that almost unravels the whole saga, or at least shows how close the saga came to unravelling, the young Nelson spots what he calls a ‘suspicious-looking vessel’ off the coast of Corsica. The boat contains Bonaparte, his mother, his sister and his three brothers, although of course Nelson can’t know this. He asks his senior officer for permission to sink ...”

“... A middle-aged man​ looks insistently at a young woman. He doesn’t speak. He is smiling slightly, playing with her, but also seeking to trouble her. After a moment she says: ‘If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose.’ After a much longer moment he laughs. Has he found his match? Does she understand him, or does she just know how to play this particular game? The film in which this scene occurs, and in which a whole series of versions of it are offered to us, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and viewers and deemed an annoying waste of time by others ...”

“... tucked away in a narrow corner of time and space and class. One statue looks ‘comically’ young, ‘like a Mabel Lucie Attwell baby’. Another appears ‘beefy’, and on still another ‘the straight sag of the jowl gives a Mussolini effect.’ Many of them have slit eyes because round eyes ‘would give the coy surprise of George Robey’. The ...”

“... as humdrum history, the second time as printed farce. Canet meanwhile is having an affair with a young Vertheuil employee (Christa Théret) who wants to digitise everything. The places in the film are as restricted and repetitive as the persons. After the office and restaurant, we get living rooms where people eat and drink and quarrel, bedrooms where they ...”

“... offered excuses to minor users.’ Ah yes, the war on drugs serves a noble cause, protecting the young. In the film, Anslinger says less obliquely that drugs and Black people are ‘a contamination to our civilisation’, and that ‘this jazz music is the devil’s work.’ He immediately gets more funding for the Bureau. This thread in the film is based ...”

“... but we see the film as if it were already made. It’s about two people who had an affair when young and meet up again in order to fail to beget a sequel. In a very elegant invention, when Chris is lingering in what used to be Bergman’s house, she meets the actor we have seen playing the man in the as yet unmade movie. He’s just a tourist at this ...”

“... a photograph shows Catilina in bed with an underage pop star – who turns out not to be so young after all. This material not only provides a background for the enmity between the architect-inventor and the mayor, it conjures up a world where errors and falsehood can be recognised, and where the mildly monstrous, always operatic Catilina may after all ...”