The Illusion of Depth

You are being watched all the time. CCTV cameras track you on the street, in your car and on public transport. Your internet provider records every web page you have ever visited and Search Engines track everything you have ever searched for. Your smartphone knows exactly where you have been and how much time you spent there.  They are watching you. They know what toothpaste you like, and how often you order pizza. They know who your friends are, and what television shows you watch.  They probably know more about your sexual predilections than you do, and they certainly know about those pills you're taking and those videos you bootlegged and those payments you neglected to mention to your accountant. You might hope they never find out about that other thing (you know the one I'm talking about) but they probably already know about that too. Privacy is a big deal at the moment.  People value their privacy; they are obsessed with it. For many people, it's the most important ...

Before we go any further, let me say that no , this week's film is not about abortion. It is however very much about choice . The abortion rights movement have championed the idea of "choice" because they have chosen (see what I did there?) to frame the battle as one of personal freedom . Also because their opponents would otherwise try to label them "anti-life", which doesn't look so good on a placard. But the dirty little secret of the abortion battle is that everyone is pro-choice. The argument is not about choice; it's about who gets to make that choice. In some communities, the choice is left to the individual, while in other communities, the choice is made by the State.  Everybody wants to choose. Some people also want to choose for others. Choice is very much the issue at hand in our next film, which takes place in North London's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Disobedience , based on Naomi Alderman's 2006 novel, tells the story of Ronit ...

In 2018, a teacher in a Manhattan private school was explaining how to calculate angles during his Calculus class. While doing so, he raised and lowered his arm to visualise the angles he was describing. At one point, he looked down at his arm and realised he had inadvertently performed a Nazi salute. "Heil, Hitler," he quipped. Word of the incident spread quickly on social media, and a number of concerned parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school unless appropriate action was taken against this Anti-Semitic teacher. About two weeks later, the teacher (whose father was Jewish, and who had two great-grandparents who were killed in Auschwitz) was fired. ** In 2021, a music professor at the University of Michigan launched a course about the process of turning a stage play into an opera, focussing on Shakespeare's Othello . He began by screening the 1965 film version of Othello , starring Laurence Olivier in blackface. Students accused the professor (who h...

Please note that this week's film is rated 15 in the UK, mostly for profanity, and for very frank and unfiltered discussions of sex. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, including a Woody Allen film in any film series would not have been considered especially controversial. Whether it was the "early, funny ones" ( Sleeper; Love & Death; Bananas ) the "iconic" ones ( Annie Hall; Manhattan ) or the "mature" ones ( Zelig; Hannah and her Sisters; Crimes and Misdemeanors ) Woody Allen was consistently regarded as one of the finest film-makers of his generation. His films regularly featured prominently in the Oscar Nominations year after year (although he never turned up to collect them, because that would mean going to California) and he was practically the only film-maker in the United States who was able to make his films with no studio interference whatsoever. Today, Woody Allen has effectively been "cancelled". American studios have stopped dist...