‘A towering piece of monoculture’: how The Odyssey discourse has dominated this summer

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Christopher Nolan’s smash hit epic has continued to excite and enrage everyone from rightwingers to academics, an old-fashioned throwback to a uniting big-screen event Peter Bradshaw reviews The Odyssey The Odyssey: jaw-dropping action, dark magic and dolphin cameos – discuss with spoilers Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office If a high-profile academic is reviewing a movie for the London Review of Books , that movie in question must be making some kind of mark on some kind of culture. And if people are actually reading a movie review in the London Review of Books, and writing thinkpieces in disagreement or favor of said movie or its review, that movie may actually be a cultural phenomenon. Normally, volume of discourse about a movie should not be mistaken for a sign that people are actually seeing it. Sometimes online factions just have a bored fixation not shared by the rest of the world. But Christopher Nolan ’s The Odyssey has some major recei...
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Big swings, big misses and big deals: what happened at this year’s Sundance?

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The 40th edition of the independent film festival saw some multimillion-dollar deals but also had attendees question if there was a drop in quality

The high bar raised by last year’s Sundance film festival had caused many to feel a little underwhelmed by this year’s edition, a commonly tweeted and spoken concern over just whether this year could truly boast a major breakout movie. Twelve months prior, the workplace thriller Fair Play, erotic drama Passages, nifty horror Talk to Me, romcom Rye Lane, timely documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, mother-son music tale Flora and Son and decade-spanning romance Past Lives caused waves that continued for the next year, an unusually robust lineup, fittingly given that it was Sundance’s big in-person comeback.

It was a slightly more muted affair over in Utah this year, some attributing a weaker lineup to 2023’s dual strikes, which prevented many productions from going ahead, but there were still enough gems amid the murk and a promising raft of major multimillion deals. Because while the strikes may have allegedly affected the roster, they also had a definite impact on the thirst of buyers, in frantic need of films to help repair lighter-than-usual release schedules. There might not have been anything as buzzy as Past Lives but this year’s crop of films continued to edge away from a reliance on A-listers to draw attention, a relief after a period of limp, star-led projects taking slots away from smaller, more deserving fare.

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