The Illusion of Depth

This week's film is rated 15 in the UK, and is in French, Arabic and Wolof, with English subtitles. Our next film tells the story of a young French girl growing up in a conservative Muslim household on the outskirts of Paris. Writer/Director Maïmouna Doucouré drew upon her own experiences growing up in just such an environment, drawing a stark contrast between the ultra-traditionalism of her family life and the loud, unrelenting pressure of life in the age of social media. It's a powerful (and very honest) film that tells a difficult story about a young girl torn between one world, in which women are little more than sexual objects, and another world. In which women are little more than sexual objects. The film was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award in 2020. The star, Fathia Youssouf, received a César Award for Most Promising Actress. Then it was picked up by Netflix for worldwide distribution. And all hell broke loose. That'...

  It's very easy to condemn Cancel Culture when the lynch mob is coming after Communists, or Homosexuals, or Black People, or Architects (I know... I'm hung up on Ayn Rand). But sometimes the mindless, murderous mob goes after something that is genuinely dangerous; something that actually does need to be stopped. Sometimes the witches are real. Does that mean the witch-hunters are right? Fritz Lang's M   was released in 1931 and is still considered to be one of the great films of all time. It tells the story of a serial-killer of very young children (Peter Lorre, in his first starring role) who has been terrorising Berlin; causing fear and paranoia across every level of society. Although Peter Lorre's character is unambiguously a very, very bad person (the film makes no attempt to sugar-coat his actions, without ever showing anything onscreen) the film is more concerned with the reaction of the rest of the community. From the frantic parents to the overworked police de...

  As most of you will probably know by now, our current film series is looking at a phenomenon currently termed Cancel Culture . Current examples of Cancel Culture are legion, and one has only to glance at the news on any given day to see yet another example of some individual or other whose life has been torn apart because they said the wrong thing, or "liked" the wrong Tweet, or praised the wrong film. As of this writing, a story has been running in the UK news about an Essex pub that was raided by the police because it had "Golly" dolls on display. Last week, the full force of the internet came crashing down on the Dalai Lama because he allegedly asked a young boy to " suck his tongue. " When a new Harry Potter video game was released in February, fans were urged to boycott the release in order to protest author J.K. Rowling's views on transgender issues. Some of these cases may strike you as trivial. Some of them might be genuinely shocking. Some ...