class system
Nick Hasted
Switching between upstairs and downstairs makes your soul melt, in this first of three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter films, a savage class satire filmed in the freezing winter of 1963.Hugo (Dirk Bogarde) is the obsequious, insinuating butler who comes to stay with minor, lounging young aristo Tony (James Fox) at his new Chelsea pad. The pricey house is soggy with rot when Hugo arrives, though louche Tony, declaring himself “cosy” with his bed of newspapers and three-bar fire, sees nothing amiss. Hugo’s dubious, papier-mâché provenance as a gentleman’s gentleman is clear from his first Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Nest is a peculiar animal, hard to nail down, parts family drama and social satire, but with a creepy sense of suspense rippling under the surface that threatens to bust the plot wide open. The fact that it’s written and directed by Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Southcliffe) makes sense of the unease. But at the film's heart is an old-fashioned marital tussle, between an independent, no-nonsense American woman and her posturing, bullshitting, over-striving English husband, each performed with nuance and gusto by Carrie Coon and Jude Law. You could cut the Read more ...
Zehra Kazmi
For a slim book of some 100 pages, Batlava Lake by Adam Mars-Jones is deceptively meandering. The novella is narrated by Barry Ashton, an engineer attached to the British Army troops stationed with the peacekeeping forces during the Kosovo War. Barry admits to us that he is not good on the phone, or on paper, and he struggles putting things into words face to face. However, Barry always will “tidy up, get things orderly, enjoy fixing things, rehang a door without mentioning it.” He presents himself as one of the boys, though the reader begins to see through that lad façade as the story Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Amina Cain is a writer of near-naked spaces and roomy characters. Her debut collection of short fiction, I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues, 2009), located itself in the potential strangeness of everyday thoughts and experience. Her second, Creature (Dorothy, 2013), was likewise interested in the weirdness of being in the world. Indelicacy is her first novel: a slim, lucidly imagined account of a cleaner who is captivated by the paintings at the art museum where she works, and by the idea of writing about herself looking at them. In an undefined past and place, Vitória’s lot changes Read more ...
James Dowsett
CLR James came to London from Trinidad in 1932, clutching the manuscript of his first and only novel. He soon found work, writing about cricket for the Manchester Guardian, as well as a political faith, revolutionary Trotskyism, which would inspire him to set aside his literary ambitions for political activism. James would instead make his name as one of the finest intellectuals of the 20th century. The Black Jacobins, his pioneering study of the Haitian Revolution, led by the charismatic, ex-slave Toussaint L'Ouverture, became a ground-breaking work of black history.Minty Alley is ultimately Read more ...
Charlie Stone
It is near impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if slavery and colonialism had never existed, let alone to write a book on the subject. Courttia Newland sets himself this daunting task in his latest novel, A River Called Time. Imaginative fiction rubs shoulders with a naturalistic impulse to create the world of the Ark, an alternate reality in which African cultural influences represent the status quo. Rooted in a decolonised narrative style where every turn of phrase brings forth the weight of its cultural implications, A River Called Time is a deeply thoughtful, Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors. The text, released in an updated translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.Ernaux’s writing marks a return to the real after the deconstructive emphasis of mid-20th century French fiction. But rather than picking up traditional realism in Read more ...
Owen Richards
Beauty queen pageants have long been ripe for parody, from their plastic glamour to the Machiavellian competitiveness. Miss Juneteenth opts for a much more nuanced approach, using the pageant as a focal point for a mother and daughter navigating their difficult present and possible future. It’s a universal story of familial love, told and performed with deftness and real personality.Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise Jones, a former Miss Juneteenth, whose life never lived up to the promise of that title. Unlike so many high-flying winners, she’s a single mother working two jobs as a bar worker Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of those books that you want to read very quickly, its writing slickly modern and its characters compellingly flawed. Lauren is a graduate HR employee specialising in the tricky task of making people redundant. She comes from humble beginnings, but wants to put all that behind her, focusing on the dream apartment and the adjoining shiny City life. Callum is a university drop-out who works in guest hospitality, tending rental properties for the rich and famous before Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian film suggests a peculiar amalgam of Angela Carter and Jean Genet, with dollops here and there of The Exorcist and even a brief nod towards Alien.The pregnant Ana (a sad-eyed Marjorie Estiano) finds herself falling for her baby’s serene-seeming nanny, Clara (a transfixing Isabél Zuaa). That the newborn turns out to be a werewolf sends Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
British director Fyzal Boulifa makes his feature film debut with a bruising account of female-friendship torn apart by personal tragedies and gossipmongers, on a council estate in Harlow. At under an hour and a half, Boulifa shows a gift for economic storytelling, but that doesn’t mean it comes without an emotional wallop. The story centres on two twenty-something mothers who have been best friends since school. Lynn is played by street-cast actress Roxanne Scrimshaw, who makes a startling debut, and Lucy by Nichola Burley (Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights), who delivers at Read more ...
Owen Richards
Only those who really love you can deliver the hard truths, and for filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, that one love is romantic comedies. Better known as one half of band Summer Camp, Sankey is a self-confessed romcom expert, having watched nearly every film from the 80s onwards. It was her happy place, but in this new visual essay on MUBI, she breaks down the huge number of problematic tropes that fill the genre.There are certain rules that nearly every romantic comedy abides by. There are the female-led films, with straight, middle-class, white women defined by their weight and career, until they Read more ...