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Debts owing

Debts owing

Criticism , Theatre Jul 06, 2013

“A man can die but once,” wrote Shakespeare, putting the words into the mouth of Frances Feeble, one of Sir John Falstaff’s hapless recruits in Henry IV, Part II. “We owe God a death.” Of course, some of us not only

On the surface of memory and history

With the hype that accompanied it long behind us, it seems fair to say today that Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011) was little more than a parlour trick: a blatant retelling of Singin’ in the Rain that convinced moviegoers it

Daily life the key to war

In her 1959 collection of frontline dispatches, Faces of War, Martha Gellhorn describes how she came to turn her attention to the civilian dramas of modern warfare, the rendering of which, in carefully observed, highly empathetic prose, came to characterise

Linguistic thriller with a touch of northern noir

This is a novel about the sole surviving speaker of an ancient Siberian language who is discovered by a Russian expert on Samoyedic dialects who makes the fatal mistake of telling a Helsinki-based professor of Finno-Ugric languages about it. To

Cat on a spinning Victrola

A couple of years ago, for the briefest of moments, I was a bit of an expert on Simon Stone. Which is rather to say that, for the briefest of moments, I had arguably seen more of Stone’s work than

Beyond Representation: Hollywood, the Holocaust and the Image of History in ‘Schindler’s List’

Despite its Academy Award for Best Picture and its substantial commercial success, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) remains a critically contested film. This essay looks at a number of its stylistic and dramatic strategies, as well as a number of

Nuanced critique of nihilist Russia

In the lead-up to the March 4 Russian presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won in a landslide amid allegations of fraud, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by Thomas de Waal titled ‘How Gogol Explains the Post-Soviet World’. “How about

Of Love and Purgatory

“If nine out of ten spoken word pieces are made better by the inclusion of movement,” Melbourne dance critic Chris Boyd wrote at the conclusion of the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival, “then nine out of ten movement pieces are