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Second ComingSecond Coming (2015) at the end of two long days of screenings, and its blend of social realism and dreamlike religious analogy snapped me out of a soporific haze. From it, I learnt not pick my “film of the week” until I’d seen everything on offer – and to go into every screening with the awareness that what I’m about to see might just be a masterpiece. MKRawJulia Ducournau told me that when she was very young, her parents left her in a room with a TV on which she managed to find and watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Having grown up on horror movies, and lived through the “video nasties” panic about the corrupting influence of the genre, it was wonderful to find a modern auteur who cited a traumatic encounter with horror as a formative creative experience. Raw/Grave (2017) is a thrillingly confident debut feature, buzzing with subversive energy. MKThe Ghost That Never ReturnsDodge Brothers, I have spent many years providing live, … [Read more...] about Inspiring culture: 50 works that changed our critics’ lives

Ash’s eight-day stint on the Filadelfia forms the spine of her first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town; artfully, she returns to it again and again, to the point where you come to believe she must always have known she would one day put the experience between hard covers. But this was, she insists, never her plan. Her thesis complete, she was interning at the Times Literary Supplement when a publisher spotted a piece she had written about a trip she took on another trawler, the Crystal Sea – that publisher asked to meet her, and duly gave her a book deal (she now works for an educational charity). And in person, it’s impossible not to take her at her word. I’m amazed and slightly shocked when she reveals that she spent, in total, just three and a half months in Newlyn; something about her book – the intimacy of the encounters it describes; the epic quality of her account of life on the Filadelfia – leads you to imagine that she … [Read more...] about The young woman and the sea: Lamorna Ash’s adventures on a Cornish trawler

Alerted to the injustice of his plight by Cosell and a coterie of concerned admirers that included Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, others began to acknowledged the material sacrifice Ali had made: the best years of his career, from the age of 25 to 29. They recognised also that Ali risked five years’ imprisonment, a sentence avoided with the high-profile support of those enlightened campaigners who brought their influence to bear in one of the most public discussions Americans engaged in over Vietnam. His exile encompassed a significant shift in image. Ali had been a hate figure when he refused to fight, the original court hearing finding him guilty after only 20 minutes’ deliberation in 1967 on the very day that boxing authorities took away his title and banned him from fighting for three years. In June, 1971, however, the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction, 8-0, a points decision as clear-cut as any among the 56 victories of his boxing career, and he … [Read more...] about Fighter, joker, magician, religious disciple, preacher: Muhammad Ali