American witchhunt: how the McCarthy blacklist annihilated the Hollywood left

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A retrospective at the Locarno film festival looks back at the era of Huac’s domination of US culture, uncovering some sobering lessons for now In September 2025, Disney and ABC announced that Jimmy Kimmel and his late-night talkshow would be taken off the air indefinitely , after a conservative backlash against the host’s comments about the murder of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk. President Donald Trump personally championed the decision, calling it “great news for America” . He further called for other programmes critical of his administration to be removed. Though Kimmel’s suspension was reversed within a week, many commentators viewed this concerning development not as a sudden escalation of crisis, but a continuation of Hollywood’s habitual acquiescence to authoritarian pressure. In a guest essay for the New York Times , journalist and Trump biopic] The Apprentice screenwriter Gabriel Sherman explicitly linked Kimmel’s cancellation to the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and ...
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The Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival
Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.

Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.

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