BEST TV SHOWS of 2016

1. The Girlfriend Experience
2. Sillicon Valley
3. The Night Of
4. Top Chef
5. Westworld

BEST SONGS of 2016

1. 29 #Strafford APTS— Bon Iver
2. The Numbers — Radiohead
3. Sunday Love — Bats For Lashes
4. Everything I Am Is Yours — Villagers
5. Too Much is Never Enough — Florence + The Machine
6. Born Again Teen — Lucius
7. Tiny Human — Imogen Heap
8. Hey, Stellar — Honeyblood
9. Alive — Sia
10. Doria — Olafur Arnulds

REVIEW: SILENCE (dir. Scorsese)

'These early scenes, fraught with peril, are as tight with distrust and paranoia as anything in The Departed,and yet they are also unexpectedly moving. Shot often by guttering candle-light, shrouded in mist and shadow, we examine muddy but hopeful faces faces rendered beautiful by the simple quality of devotion, see hands clasping hands, exchanging crosses — the images as simple and transfixing as those of Albrect Durer. “Christ did not die for the good and beautiful, he died for the miserable and corrupt,” says Rodrigues, an article of Jesuit faith that could also encompass Scorsese’s own rogue’s gallery of sinners over the years... For all of Hollywood’s flimsy bromides to the “triumph of the human spirit,” the genuine article is a much more elusive creature. Yet here it is — stubborn, wily, unbeautiful — running right through this film like piano wire. Scorsese owes the world only one thing: his sincerity. With some of his recent work Scorsese has seemed a great filmmaker in search of the grand obsession that pushed his earlier films into existence. Silence is the first film of his in a long time that feels born of that pressure — like it needs to exist. The result feels like something close to a state of grace.'— From my review for Newsweek

BEST FILM SCORES of 2016

1.  La La Land, Justin Hurwitz
2. Arrival, Johann Johannsson
3. Jackie, Mica Levi
4. Before The Flood, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
5. Moonlight, Nicholas Britell

BEST PERFOMANCES of 2016

1.  Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash
2. Ruth Negga, Loving
3. Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea
4. Emma Stone, La La Land
5. Greta Gerwig, 20th Century Women
6. Michelle Williams, Manchester By Sea
7. Ryan Gosling, La La Land
8. Rebecca Hall, Christine
9. Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water
10. Tom Hanks, Sully

BEST MOVIES OF 2016

1.  La La Land
2. Manchester By The Sea
3. Silence
4. Loving
5. Arrival
6. O. J. Simpson: Made In America
7. Moonlight
8. Love & Friendship
9. Zootopia
10. 20th Century Women

INTERVIEW: ELLEN BURSTYN

"Ellen Burstyn is  the kind of actress who in England who would have been made a dame long ago: elegant of bearing,  regal of poise, but possessed of the the scrappy spirit of a prize-fighter.  When she first made it in Hollywood in the 1970s she was already in her forties, her   jaunty survivor’s humor  sparkling like a diamond in movies like Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show  (1971), Rob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973),   and Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore  (1974), for which she won an Oscar. These days, she is enjoying a terrific second wind, portraying women who seem to have lived several lifetimes for directors who have barely had a chance to live half of one themselves — Darren Aronofsky, James Gray, and now Solondz, whose Weiner Dog is a pitch-black comedy about a female dachshund stoically enduring a series of ever more decrepit owners. Burstyn plays the oldest of these, a blind, crochety biddy who names the dog Cancer — a touch typical of the film’s kitschy deadpan humor, which is somewhere between John Waters and Robert Bresson. Wearing wraparound shades and speaking in Delphic monosyllables, Burstyn provides the film with a beating heart. Haunted, Scroogelike, by  the ghosts of Nanas past—identical young girls with copper tresses who  chide her in Anime-like monotone for missing out on forgiveness and love.  She awakes, her face a mask of tears.  “He's absolutely an individual voice," says the 78-year old actress of Solondz, whose Welcome to the Dollhouse first caught her attention while working  the film festival track in 1995. “As I read the script, I went ‘Oh, this guy is just so weird, so adorably weird.’ There's something very kind about the way he views us silly people. That’s what I have always loved — any filmmaker who has his own voice and is making his or her own kind of movies, because they have something that they want to say.” — from my interview for The Daily Telegraph

PROFILE: STEVEN SPIELBERG

'When Steven Spielberg is enthused, which is often, his sentences pick up speed and momentum, the words seemingly unable to leave his mouth fast enough, coming in a long unpunctuated sentences that have you worried he’s going to forget to breath.  We are sitting in the conference room of his production offices at Amblin Partners, a two-story baked adobe building that looks a little like a cross between Fred Flintstones cave and a Mexican resort chalet, situated in a quiet corner of the Universal lot surrounded by lawns, palm tress and slightly fake-looking boulders. On one wall of the conference room sits three Norman Rockwell originals and the famous Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane, mounted inside a protective glass case.  Downstairs are an editing suite, a screening room, complete with candy and refreshments, a daycare centre, and a restaurant-sized kitchen. Spielberg arrives tailed by a small team of assistants and assorted PR personnel waiting on his every word, like President Bartlett surrounded by his staffers in the West Wing. He is dressed in a rather natty suede jacket, his grey hair combed neatly, one of those men who never quite escaping the impression of having the finishing touches to any outfit provided by his wife. He sits down opposite me and clasps his hands together, a smile on his face, thumbs towards the ceiling with an attitude that says: what’s next. You get the sense of a formidable, fast-processing, if friendly, intelligence, courteously shutting down the 20 other things he has on the go in order to pivot his attention to you. “Because I’m so compartmentalized in my thinking,  I can think ahead a lot,” he tells me. “I can think very deeply forward and that’s my problem. It’s a blessing and it’s a curse.” When he was a child, his mother would tell him that his grandparents were coming to visit from Ohio, saying “its something to look forward to, they’re coming in two weeks…” He would count down with her. “Its something to look forward to, they’ll be here in a week.” Arguably, the countdown never stopped. Looking forward turned into the Spielberg occupation par excellence; from it derives his signature genre (sci-fi), his signature tone (optimistic), his signature narrative mode (Hitchcockian suspense), even his signature shot (an expectant face in close-up). While completing post-production on his Roald Dahl adaptation The BFG, and getting ready to shoot the virtual reality sci-fi thriller Ready Player One, while also in talks with Tony Kushner on another script, screenwriter David Koepp recently exchanged emails with him about ideas for a fifth Indiana Jones sequel. “I said I know you’re mixing and prepping and doing big interviews,” recalls Koepp. “Do you have the head space for it? You may be trying to do air traffic control in your head right now.’ He wrote back and said, ‘Let me worry about the air traffic control, you circle and chatter.’ Okay, here you go. I dumped all my ideas on him. Yeah, there’s a remarkable amount of head space.” It goes beyond multi-tasking — it actually calms him down, keeps him from the monomania of falling too in love with whatever it is he’s doing, or thinking it the best he’s ever filmed.  It can also trip him up — literally. On the set of The BFG, a film about the friendship of a kindly giant and a little girl that mixes live action and motion-capture animation and frequently requiring directing on three different scales at once, the floor was festooned with snaking camera cables.  “He was always tripping,” says star Mark Rylance, who plays the BFG, when I ask him which aspect of the director’s behavior he would zero in on if he were ever asked to play him. “It’s a hazardous place with the cables and stuff anyway but he has a tendency to trip. We would laugh and him and he would laugh too. His mind is so full of ideas, full of thoughts in his head. I asked him once what your element — earth, water, air, or fire — would you believe he said air?  If you did the exercise where you try and locate a person’s centre of gravity, it would not be down here, it would be up in his heart and in his head, you know.” ' — from my Spielberg profile for The Guardian

On my iPod: July 2nd 2016

1. Sunday Love — Bats for Lashes
2. Best to You — Blood Orange
3. Juno — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
4. Sledgehammer — Rihanna
5. Runaway — Nice as Fuck
6. Rgb — Olafur Arnalds
7. Peggy-O — The National
8. Quite Like You — Andy Shauf
9. Time of the Blue — The Tallest Man on Earth
10. Get Out — Frightened Rabbit

PROFILE: MELISSA MATHISON

'Such intimacy of collaboration between a writer and director is rare. The days of Howard Hawks playing backgammon on set with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, or John Ford’s marathon poker sessions with Dudley Nichols, or Hitchcock’s long gourmand lunches with John Michael Hayes have passed into legend, but the franchise farm that is modern Hollywood tends to work against such recurring collaborations. The Harry Potter films were all written by Steve Kloves but farmed out to different directors—similarly the “Bourne” and “Captain America” movies. Martin Scorsese teamed up with writer Paul Schrader three times, for “Taxi Driver” in 1976, “Raging Bull” in 1980, during the making of which they fell out, before reteaming for “Bringing out the Dead,” in 1999, from Joe Connelly’s novel about fried ambulance drivers, itself an homage to Scorsese’s New York, and thus introducing the danger of a kind of creative feedback loop. “The heroine’s called Mary,” Schrader warned the director over dinner. “Watch out for the Catholic symbols. You’ve already done that in ‘Mean Streets’ and ‘Raging Bull.’” If self-consciousness is the danger of such reunions, Mathison and Spielberg put it to work for them. Audiences have good reason to fear whenever filmmakers armed with digital paint boxes address the unlimited potential of the imagination as their subject—as Disney’s recent “Alice Through the Looking Glass” showed, C.G.I. imaginariums have a tendency towards gaudy over-crowdedness—but the images of Dahl’s dram country, briefly described in the book, have a classical, organic simplicity: a stream running uphill, a large oak tree reflected in a pool against a starry night sky, its inverted reflection a portal to the dream world. That tree could easily have been tended by Spielberg and Mathison's botanist extraterrestrial from 1982.  Like "E.T." the BFG is a two-hander, a record of a friendship, as well as a rekindled conversation between Mathison and Spielberg, the dream-catcher-turned-corporate-entertainment giant, about the nature of cinematic dreams.' — From my piece for The New Yorker

Best things I've seen in 2016 so far

1. Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash2.  The night time car rides in Midnight Special 3. Riley Keogh in The Girlfriend Experience 4. The trailer for Hail, Caesar 5. The final shot of The Witch 6. The oak tree in The BFG 7. Kate Beckinsale in Love and Friendship 8. The cliffhangers in Silicon Valley 9. Weiner 10. Winona Ryder in Show Me a Hero

GABLER'S BARBARA STREISAND

'Like the novels of Henry James, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and the Times crossword puzzle, the modern diva thrives on difficulty. Creatures of grit and will­power, sinews and sequins, they are symbols of triumphant selfhood and obstacles overcome. These days, the paradox is played out in the termitic caverns of the internet. Protected by her social media fan posse, the “Beyhive”, Beyoncé recently kicked off her Lemonade tour by selling “Boycott Beyoncé” T-shirts and iPhone cases – a sly appropriation of the calls for a boycott of her shows after her Black Panther-inspired Super Bowl appearance raised the hackles of right-wing attack dogs. Let ’em loose. What doesn’t kill Bey only makes her stronger. Modern-day divahood is self-aware, self-deconstructing and backlash-embracing, but this dynamic is as old as the Hegelian dialectic. “She became popular by demonstrating how someone like her, someone with her seeming disadvantages, could become popular,” writes Neal Gabler in his smart new book, Barbra Streisand, a biography-cum-critical essay on the Brooklyn-born diva. It may be the best book about Streisand you will ever read, an acute and sympathetic rendering of a career forged from yearning and steel – “in one person, Punch and Judy”, in the words of the New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann. Long before Beyoncé, Streisand’s fame contained its own backlash. “Barbra is the girl guys never look at twice,” said her manager Marty Erlichman. “And when she sings about that – about being an invisible woman – people break their neck trying to protect her.' — from my review of Neal Gabler's Barbara Streisand: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power

Quentin Tarantino Top Ten

As is my tradition when starting a new book on a filmmaker, my list of Tarantino movies, ranked (to see if there are any changes once I've rewatched everything/finished the book).

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Reservoir Dogs
3. Jackie Brown
4. Kill Bill 
5. Deathproof
6. Django Unchained
7. Inglorious Basterds
8. The Hateful Eight

INTERVIEW : ANNE TYLER

'Nearly all of her books are set in Baltimore, concern large families, marking time with the usual watersheds of family life — courtship, weddings, children, college, deaths. Observing her characters befuddled comings and goings with sympathy and dry humor, Tyler applies a little nudge here, a prompt there, letting out the occasional sigh of disappointment, as someone’s good intentions don’t quite pan out as planned.  I have read her wise, warm-hearted work — including Dinner at the Homseick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer-prize winning Breathing Lessons — religiously for over 20 years but I never thought we would meet.   She isn’t a recluse in the  Salinger mould, exactly — her novels bustle with too much gossip and life to give any impression other than one of supreme embededness — but she hasn’t given an interview in over 40 years. Then in 2012, she gave an interview to NPR to promote her novel The Beginner’s Goodbye. Others followed. Something seemed to have shifted in Tylerland. Some personal perestroika? A deep tectonic shift in the psychic-creative forces that govern literary careers? A kind of settling-up as she enters her eighth decade? Nothing of the sort, she says. Her editors just asked her and this time she thought: why not?  “I often wonder what would happen if I had Tolstoy around for tea,” she says gaily, while preparing coffee for me in her kitchen. “I’d probably have nothing to say to him.”  It’s like hearing that Gorbachev launched glasnost because he woke up one day and fancied a coke.  But then that is very Tyleresque, the long groove of routine disrupted by a sudden burst of to-hell-with-it impetuosity. A small dose of whimsy is detectable in late-period Tyler. ' — from my Sunday Times interview

Trump and the art of the braggart

'Trump’s MO is much the same as Clay’s: constant declamation of his own worth (“I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created…. I’m so good looking…. Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich…”) interrupted by restatements of the incompetence of his enemy. A man who has rendered himself an orange-hued cartoon for the purposes of reality TV, Trump has a master caricaturist’s instinct for turning his opponents, too, into cartoons (“low energy [Bush], Little Marco…. Lyin' Ted….”) so he can then kapow! them. His fame may have been incubated on reality TV and in the Twittersphere but his persona — big, brash, boastful — goes all the way back to the Wild West, and the tall-talking show offs, of somewhat fuzzy historical provenance, who spun the unfunny facts of frontier existence into comic fictions around the camp fire and bar room stove — Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack said to have created the Great Lakes to water his ox Babe, trained ants to do logging work and eat 50 pancakes in one minute; Sam Hyde (“the Munchausen of the red man”) who claimed to have killed a whale by plugging its spout hole; or Davy Crockett, the pioneer from Tennessee who told Congress in 1857, “I can walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel yell like an Indian, fight like a devil and spout like an earthquake, make love like a mad bull!” This is how the West was won: with boasting. “American braggadocio is more than usually distasteful” wrote novelist Anthony Trollope, rather missing the point. The Old World virtues of reserve and modesty were only possible in a heavily stratified society in which everyone knew his place and nobody pointed it out. Such tall frontier talk not only tamed fear and made friends of strangers, it established your bona fides in a fluid, fast-moving society that had largely cut loose from such social indices as class, family and birthplace. You were who you said you were, with all the elasticity of spirit and potential for charlatanism that implied.   “It is good to be shifty in a new country" says Joseph Hooper’s  Simon Suggs, one of many confidence tricksters who prowl the pages of 19th century American literature, suckering their unsuspecting compatriots — Melville’s The Lightning Rod Man, the Duke and the King in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Joseph Baldwin’s Ovid Bolus, a “natural liar” who lies “with a relish from the delight in invention”. In each case, these unscrupulous Fagins draw from the reader a certain amount of awe and respect together with a suspicion that the boundless self-assertion is barely a breath away from what makes America great. Edgar Allen Poe called his era “the epoch of the hoax.”' — from my column for 1843

INTERVIEW: KATE BECKINSALE

'England can be a little proprietorial about its actresses. Reading between the lines of the stellar reviews (“the most entertaining performance in Kate Beckinsale's career,” “Kate Beckinsale is back to her best” “the meatiest part Beckinsale’s been given”), it’s not hard to detect a note of gentlemanly regret for the amount of werewolves she’s been forced to slay over the years. In the post-Hunger Games world, the idea of our leading Shakespereans perfecting their American accents and kicking butt in female-led actioners is par for the course: Kate Winslett attached her name to the Divergent franchise, and Emily Blunt signed up for more Edge of Tomorrows with Tom Cruise. Beckinsale was in many ways the first, proving her blockbuster mettle in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in 2001, before embarking on the Underworld films at a time when English actresses were still following the Emma Thompson model: one American film, then back to London for a recuperative spot of Shakespeare and a cold compress for the forehead. Beckinsale not only didn’t do that but she then left her English actor boyfriend Michael Sheen, to marry her Underworld director Len Wiseman — boo hiss!  — a neat triple blow to national pride. She   embraced American action auteurs, Los Angeles and vampire film franchises in one move, and paid for it in coverage that painted her as the English girl who had lost her head in Hollywood — a red carpet ditz.   “It's a really weird window of time,” she says. “It was at the time where if you moved to LA you were immediately an ass, in England. It was something that you had to apologize for constantly to press, to your family. It was immediately like, "You're going to become a dick. I was somebody who mainly seemed to walk around the red carpet, which was completely not the case. I spent 90 percent of my time rushing home to look after my kid, which was excellent protection. Nobody wants to try and shag the woman who's wearing a Baby Bjorn.” It’s not hard to see why Scorsese cast her as Ava Gardner in The Aviator. Beckinsale’s mixture of boldness, raunch and slight edging of camp harkens back to another, older tradition of female stars at the movies — the board, the dame, the vamp, as embodied by such Home Counties glamor queens as Liz Taylor, Joan Collins and Jane Seymour. Her favorite film is All About Eve, with Bette Davis letting loose one smart bomb after another.   “It's really fun seeing her with the paparazzi at Sundance. It was like a 1930's movie star,” says Stillman, “I've never seen so many flash cameras. I’m still blinded.” — from my interview for The Sunday Times

The death of the big screen

“That's certainly what the movie philosophers are thinking,“ says Lynda Obst veteran producer of Sleepless in Seattle and last year’s Interstellar. “As television, now, gets more and more deep into character and more like extended both Saturday afternoon matinees and indie movies, the job of movies is to become more and more extraordinary. We can't do the same job that television is doing so well.”  Film is the more purely visual medium. It has our full attention: each frame must pull its weight in terms of narrative or spectacle. We leave home to see it, and we want an experience that honors that spirit of adventure: we want to be swept of our feet, to go on a journey, to fall in love, to have our central nervous systems hijacked. That is why it is a director’s medium — it envelops us. TV comes to us, into our homes. It is casual, familiar, favouring habit-forming episodic narratives. That is why it is a writer’s medium.    The big screen glamorises; it’s stars the stuff of myth; the small screen is more like a member of the family. “I think you can probably watch Bridge of Spies at home but I wouldn't want to watch ET or Close Encounters of the Third Kind at home,” says Obst. “I wouldn't want to watch Revenant at home.  And something like The Avengers, it's too much fun laughing with the audience. So, these things are just communal experiences. We watch TV at home and we feel differently about television stars than we do about movie stars because the movie screen is much bigger and much more mythical. That's why the material is intrinsically different.”— from my piece for the Financial Times 

PROFILE: TERRENCE MALICK

'The new Terrence Malick film Knight of Cups arrives in cinemas this week. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “the ongoing Terrence Malick project arrives back in theaters, after a protracted spell in the editing room, this week with some new actors in it.” His films have reached such a level of wispy abstraction that they have long since blurred into a single strip of celluloid — a  dance  of  beautiful actors baring their souls in fragments of dialogue and whispered voiceover, while  cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski bobs and weaves through the tall grass like a daydreaming Keats. This one  has  Christian Bale as a screenwriter adrift in the pleasure-dome of modern Hollywood, wandering from  night-club to pool party, frolicking with a series of willowy beauties — Frieda Pinto, Natalie Portman — who whisper  promises of damnation and deliverance  (“Where will I meet you? Which way shall I go? How do I begin?”) while trailing their hands in pools, or gamboling through surf. Bale wears the  grim-set expression of a man beset by sirens, although as critics have been quick to point out: Knight of Cups’s depiction of the Babylon of modern Hollywood both looks and sounds suspiciously like an advert for the fragrance one should wear while braving it. But then the film is only notionally about Hollywood, in the same way that The Thin Red Line was only tangentially about the war in the Pacific. All Malick films are about the same thing — man’s fall from grace, Paradise Lost — a theme he was worked and reworked in six film spanning four decades.  Working “from the inside out,” he shots many of his scenes twice, once with dialogue and once without,  giving him greater freedom in the cutting room, where he can layer up the scenes with voiceover and music, cutting the cord of direct engagement between audience and the drama, to kindle a mesmerised dependence on the opiate of imagery alone.  “He just got bored with his own writing and with our acting and started to see another movie in there,” said star Richard Gere of  Days of Heaven, the 1978 film shot almost entirely at the magic hour of dusk, and which took Malick two years to edit, so exhausting him he didn’t make another film for 20 years. “He was looking for God’s light” said costar Sam Shephard. It is a strong contender for the most beautiful movie ever made.' — from my piece for The New Statesman 

Top Ten Prince tracks

1. Sign O' The Times
2. Kiss
3. When Doves Cry
4. Raspberry Beret
5. If I Was Your Girlfriend
6. Let's Go Crazy
7. Sexy Mothafucker
8. The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
9. Diamonds and Pearls
10.  I Wanna Be Your Lover

On My iPod: April 15th 2016

1. Laser Gun — M83
2. Waves (Tame Impala Remix) — Miguel
3. The Sound — The 1975
4. Everything I Have is Yours  — Villagers
5. Never Knew You Loved Me Too — Freddy Thompson & Kelly Jones
6. Before You Fell — Marit Larsen
7. Pirate Dial — M Ward
8. Make Me Like You — Gwen Stefani
9. Alive — Sia
10. Close to You — Rihanna

REVIEW: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (Nichols)

'The director Jeff Nichols  has rather crept up on us, much like his films. He has made four of them — “Shotgun Stories” (2007), “Take Shelter” (2011), “Mud” (2012), and now “Midnight Special” — in which his themes have emerged as clearly as oncoming headlights at night. The settings is the forgotten American heartland of trailer homes and pickup trucks,  gas stations and motels, beer and bad TV. His characters are blue-collar workers, the kind of people who, in Obama’s clanger of 2008, “cling to guns or religion”. In another filmmaker’s world they would be dismissed as religious nuts — conspiracy cultists, hoarding books on lay-lines and blanking out their windows to keep out the daylight. In Nichols world they are the heroes. Here, the wackjobs are right.  In one extraordinary sequence, great balls of fire descend from the heavens on a lonely gas station, scorching and crumpling the tarmac: the world of Edward Hopper interrupted by the world of Steven Spielberg. It is to Spielberg that many reviewers have turned for comparisons — in particular the early Spielberg of E.T. and Close Encounters, who dreamed of alien visitation in terms of rampaging hoovers and runaway toys — but there’s no music playing during the sequence, which is almost silent but for the sound of the crumpling tarmac. Nichols works in a maximalist film culture, in a maximalist genre (sci-fi) but he is a bona fide minimalist, a master of the ellipse: Take Shelter was maybe the sparest movie about the apocalypse you’ll ever see. This film, too, is shaved to the bone.   In one scene, a man levels a gun at another man’s head, a scene we’ve seen enough to know that the filmmaking world divides into two camps: those who would show the gunshot and those who would cut to the exterior of the dwelling and the muffled sound of a gunshot.  Nichols does neither: he cuts on the sound of the victim’s increasingly rapid breathing and moves calmly into the next scene. No exterior. No gunshot. What more do we need than a man’s last breath?' — from my review of Midnight Special for The Economist

REVIEW: 'UNFINISHED' at the MET

'A whole room could have been put together from the subset of works interrupted by the French revolution, including  David’s portrait of Adelaide Madame Pastoret and her son (1791-2) left unfinished because of emergent political differences between David and Pastoret’s Royalist husband with the result that the sewing needle she is supposed to be holding is not there, invisible — one of the daintiest net effects of the Jacobin Terror imaginable.  Less satisfying  is the latter portion of the exhibition, when the non finito aesthetic meets the modern artists who most fully embraced it, when the exhibition catches up with itself, so to speak  — the result being exquisite self-cancellation. Here are Janine Antoni’s heads in soap and chocolate, missing the noses bitten off by three visitors, a testament to their own impermanence, or  Edward Ruscha lithographs in the That is Right portfolio — variously titled That is Right, Actual, Correct, Definite, Certain,  Sure, Exact and Final — in direct mockery of our completist urges, or Andy Warhol’s  Do It Yourself (Violin) 1962, a facsimile of a paint-by-numbers kit with only the  bottom half of violin  complete, the rest of it numbered blanks awaiting color from the bored suburban housewife who is to be imagined dabbing at it while she waits the arrival of her husband back from work. It’s not just the loftiness of the irony that is off-putting — although it does scream 1960s as loudly as Mad Men-era porkpie hats — but the fact that this testament to the unfinished is itself, painstakingly finished, inch by pedantic inch.' — from my review of 'Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible', at the Met Breuer

BEST FILM SCORES of 2015

1. Carol — Carter Burwell
2. The Revenant — Ryuichi Sakamoto
3. The Danish Girl — Alexandre Desplat
4. Inside Out — Michael Giacchino
5. Bridge of Spies — Thomas Newman
6. Mad Max: Fury Road — Junkie XL
7. Tomorrowland — Michael Giacchino
8. Star Wars: The Force Awakens – John Williams

9. Steve Jobs — Daniel Pemberton
10. The Martian — Harry Gregson-Williams