On movies.

S & D & R & R has a lot going for it, but it's a little lame in some departments. Read more...

Sam Mendes is a very good director but he has a track record of disliking capitalism and isn't a lot better about human relations. Revolutionary Road makes these points almost as well as American Beauty did.  Read more...

George Clooney's Up In the Air (2009)  is in a long and noble tradition (maybe two), and it very nearly delivers. Read more...

In no particular order, here are my top movies of the last ten years. Surely, a vintage period? Read more...

The late Dominick Dunne, novelist and chronicler of celebrity trials, was by parts Taki, Jennifer's Diary, The Sunday Times Insight team, Edith Wharton, Thackeray, and J J Hunsecker (of The Sweet Smell of Success). Read more...

Previously, I listed Karen Blixen's house outside Copenhagenand Kettle's Yard, Cambridge as my favourite interiors. Casting around for third, I wondered about including Charleston, the rustic Bloomsbury hangout. Now I have a better candidate: Matisse's chapel at Saint Paul de Vence. Read more...

This is perhaps the most beautiful interior I have ever seen. It is at once bohemian and aristocratic. Karen Blixen being who she was, it is determinedly unbourgeois. It is of course also a wonderful pilgrimage site. Read more...

Neurotic young women closely observed make for great movies. Such films set themselves a splendid challenge: can they keep the audience roughly on-side? Kym - our anti-heroine in this piece - is a perfect case in point. Read more...

Look around any office. Whales wave their flukes at you. Cute dogs wear bows. Yes, there are baby-snaps and families get a look in. But animals really are it. This clever movie takes things a touching step further. Read more...

This is the best Mafia movie I have ever seen. City of God would run it close, as a gangster movie. But this is about a squarely European scene. This is set in our backyard. And it is about business as well as crime. Read more...