A confession: I wasn't familiar with the work of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) until around a decade ago, when a friend also attending the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna suggested we take a break from movies and visit the Morandi museum. So I missed a film – who knows how good it would have been? – … Continue reading Less Is More: the idiosyncratic genius of Giorgio Morandi
As regular readers will know, I’ve been posting my personal ‘year’s best’ lists ever since I started writing here in 2016, and each time I’ve prefaced the survey of my favourite movies, music, etc, with complaints about the dreadful state of British and international politics followed by the expression of (mostly forlorn) hopes for an … Continue reading My best movies, music, books and other moments from 2022
It’s not often that I write about the visual arts, mainly, I suppose, because I suspect that most of you reading my posts know at least as much as I do about the subject, maybe more. But just occasionally, as happened with the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton or the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, I come … Continue reading Ripe for (re)discovery: marvellous artist Milton Avery
For the list of my best (ie favourite) films, music, books, etc two years ago, I noted the importance of taking solace from the arts at a time when Brexit, Johnson, Trump, climate change and others were cause for such anxiety, anger and despondency. Last year, of course, with Covid having taken its toll, we’d … Continue reading Best of another bad year: movies, music and other highlights of 2021.
In the few years I’ve been posting best-of blogs in the face of worsening political circumstances, I’ve often expressed a rather forlorn hope that things might improve the following year. Well, it turns out, obviously, that the hope I expressed last year could not have been more forlorn. How terrible 2020 has been… not only … Continue reading Best of a bad year: movies, music and other highlights of 2020
One of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, Víctor Erice is also, sadly, one of the least prolific. For various reasons, since first attracting attention in 1973 with The Spirit of the Beehive, he has made only two further features (1983’s The South – which he himself regards as incomplete – and 1992’s The Quince Tree … Continue reading Stone and Sky: a new work by the great Víctor Erice
This time last year, in introducing the lists of my favourite films, music, etc, etc of 2018, I expressed the admittedly somewhat forlorn hope that 2019 would give us less reason to have to seek solace in such things, and that peace, tolerance and reason would prevail. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, … Continue reading My best movies, music and other moments from 2019
A couple of years ago, while serving on the jury of the Transylvanian International Film Festival in Cluj, I had the good fortune to visit the first ever exhibition of photographs by Cristi Puiu, one of Romania’s finest filmmakers and, indeed, one of the most interesting writer-directors in the world today. (His best known work … Continue reading Hills, vales, plains: new photographic work by Cristi Puiu
To be absolutely honest, I wasn’t really aware of Félix Vallotton, let alone of any of his pictures, until very recently. A few years ago I read ‘Keeping an Eye Open’, Julian Barnes’ excellent collection of essays on (mostly French) art, but his chapter on Vallotton hadn’t really stayed with me simply because, apart from … Continue reading Félix Vallotton: a remarkable artist you may not even have heard of (I hadn’t)
Tate Britain’s exhibition devoted to the work of the great photographer Don McCullin is, in its own pleasingly straightforward and unpretentious way, one of the finest exhibitions I’ve been to in some years. Of course, as someone who used to peruse the Sunday Times magazine in his teens, when McCullin’s strikingly vivid, often deeply disturbing … Continue reading Photographic genius at the Tate: the remarkable work of Don McCullin
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 