Reviews on The Review

With a name like Duplicity and two big Hollywood leads, this film makes no secret of its genre. A spy thriller aimed squarely at a mainstream audience I approached it with some apprehension, being renowned for my failure to follow recent Bonds, Bournes and even Batmen.
 
A couple of encouraging reviews and the fact that my [...]

There are some writers whose work is identifiable within the space of a couple of sentences. Guillermo Arriaga makes his directorial debut with The Burning Plain, but it’s a film that’s also almost instantly identifiable, bearing as it does the same hallmarks as the numerous films he’s written. Anybody who’s seen Babel, The Three Burials [...]

The paintings in room one of Glenn Brown’s exhibition at Tate Liverpool are versions of sci-fi sublime: science fiction landscapes with cities on planets, swirling gas-clouds and nebulae with space stations.  These are huge wall-sized canvases; often enlarged from small air-brush cartoons in sci-fi magazines.  Brown’s debts to the romantic sublime of John Martin are [...]

The time of Glen Duncan’s new novel A Day and a Night and a Day is post-9/11 and America is nervy. Augustus Rose, a mixed race sixties radical, has infiltrated a group of extremists in the hope of avenging the death of his lover Selina in a fictional 2002 bomb in El Corte Ingles in [...]

The posters for last year’s Royal Academy exhibition From Russia bore a Matisse painting as their crowd-grabbing image. In doing so, they were, unwittingly or not, reflecting the unspoken theory that most of the decent art in Russia is actually non-Russian, the spoils of World War Two. Russians, it seems, are allowed to do novels, [...]