May 2021 Spectator Cover

FROM THE MAGAZINE

May 2021

Film

A film festival fiasco in Narrowsburg, New York

Castellano and Castaldo descended upon Narrowsburg with a gust of wind, declaring that they would open an acting school, start a film festival and make it ‘the Sundance of the East’

By Nicky Otis Smith

From the Magazine

Film

Korean film has mastered the supernatural horror genre

For those of us who have followed Korean film for many years, the triumph of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden or the living-dead series Kingdom on Netflix came as no surprise

By Lawrence Osborne

From the Magazine

Film

Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans

For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life

By James Panero

From the Magazine

Book Review

Is Sohrab Ahmari a Satanic ogre?

The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari reviewed

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

Music

A prog rock progress

Steven Wilson is going about becoming a pop musician entirely the wrong way

By Michael Hann

From the Magazine

Books

Berlin has always been a Faustian metropolis

A new history of east and west, best and worst

By William Cook

From the Magazine

Books

My war of words

The agony of watching friends succeed

By Cosmo Landesman

From the Magazine

Art

More than a Klan man

Philip Guston’s work shows the hopelessness, the struggle of making art

By Hermione Eyre

From the Magazine

Podcasts

School of hard Knox

As Amanda Knox walks listeners through the day of her arrest, it’s apparent she is still upset

By Emily Ferguson

From the Magazine

Music Review

I’m turning Japanese

In the Eighties, Japan had prosperity, optimism, loads of bizarre porn and the solace of technological gadgetry

By Luke Haines

From the Magazine

Book Review

Read all over

Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s ‘Girl Stunt Reporters’ by Kim Todd reviewed

By Katrina Gulliver

From the Magazine

Book Review

Devil in the details

Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall reviewed

By Jamie Collinson

From the Magazine

Book Review

Thomas Hennell should be more widely known

Thomas Hennell: The Land and the Mind by Jessica Kilburn reviewed

By Andrew Lambirth

From the Magazine

Book Review

The weeping wounds of Algeria

The Art of Losing and Tomorrow They Won’t Dare Murder Us reviewed

By Boyd Tonkin

From the Magazine