reviews

Reviews of books, articles, publications, music, film, events and culture.

Happy-Go-Lucky, directed by Mike Leigh (2008)

Belying his miserabilist reputation, Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky celebrates incorrigible optimism – but with the usual twists, finds Tom Jennings

Prozac Attitude.

Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth (Channel 4) and the White season, BBC 2 (2008)

A rash of TV documentaries explain away tense British resident-immigrant relations with typical middle-class prejudice in reproducing forty years of media and state-managed mystifications of the ravages of capitalism, according to Tom Jennings.

Great White Hopeless

Gone, Baby, Gone, directed by Ben Affleck (2007)

Tom Jennings is relieved that Ben Affleck’s first film as director, the thought-provoking Gone, Baby, Gone, avoids the ham sentimentality of much of his acting

In The Best Interests of the Child

Craven New World. Film review - Tom Jennings

Polly II: A Plan For Revolution in Docklands

A comparison of UK near-future nightmares, including Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children Of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus and Polly II: A Plan For Revolution in Docklands.

Craven New World, by Tom Jennings

Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee, 2007. Film review – Tom Jennings

Review of Ang Lee’s Chinese wartime espionage drama, the follow-up to Brokeback Mountain.

Sex, War by Tom Jennings

Britz, dir. Peter Kosminsky, Channel 4, 2007. Television review – Tom Jennings

Juggling simplistic stereotypes, Channel 4’s Britz illuminates neither the attitudes of UK Muslims nor the motivations of homegrown jihadists, concludes Tom Jennings.

A Bipolar Exposition by Tom Jennings