Tom Jennings's blog

Tom Jennings considers the new softcore torture porn entertaining justifications of crimes against humanity in the name of its greater good.

Official 'truth' being more dishonest as well as stranger than fiction, Tom Jennings looks instead at feral youth fairytales screened since last August's riots.

A welcome and invaluable critical analysis of some of the effects of the genre on its viewers.

Two decades-worth of British poverty porn reveals more than might be thought.

“Rhyming for a reason, we ain’t here for the hell of it: Fuck ya deficit!” (Efeks, ‘Mass Production’)

Never mind the prissy costume drama bollocks. This raw punk historicism is a landmark, in several senses, of British cinema.

Yet another teenage gang tall story glimpses beyond the moral panics and tired miserabilism of most poverty porn.

An apparently refreshing take on underclass alienation soon sours into the same old rancid reaction

A naff cultural-historical hip-hop gospel packaged according to MTV aesthetics ...

Adam Curtis’ challenge to domination by computer systems asks questions the mainstream media – and the Left – typically avoid.

A disappointingly missed opporunity to explore recent developments in the military-industrial complex.

A rare example of television fiction doing some outrageous justice to the modern work/life (im)balance

This tale of disaffected youth trades in traditional rhetorical flourishes but succeeds in avoiding easy answers.

An unusually lucid, lurid costume drama goes straight for Victorian hypocrisy’s jugular ... Too straight, perhaps?

This entertaining exposure of late capitalist culture’s class denialism doesn’t quite convince

Iñárritu’s latest slice of urban transcendentalism shamelessly exploits underclass suffering in search of salvation

Funny how film fictions aspiring to profound philosophical insight often fall so flat.

Channel 4’s showpiece drama presents a revealingly limited portrayal of Palestine.

Another potentially interesting film tackling the human downsides of globalisation falls victim to superficial preaching

Tom Jennings reports on the eventful life and death of an outstanding work of anonymous, autonomous public art