CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Mind games from a rapidly waning empire
ANGUS REID takes issue with the pernicious imperial sabre-rattling purveyed by a dying empire in the latest edition of Top Gun
Tom Cruise as Capt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell
[IMDb]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THE sheer scale of Top Gun is breathtaking. By this I don’t mean the military hardware eagerly lent to Tom Cruise, but the way it saturates global cinema. You don’t have much choice but Top Gun if you want to watch a film for the next month.
There are 18 screenings a day at my local cinema, and it is showing in at least 24,000 cinemas simultaneously around the world. It would be absurd to take its success at the box office as a mark of quality when it is guaranteed.
The critical response, including in this paper, is overwhelmingly positive, and the audience is already in the millions. But how much of that audience have awareness of the politics that is driving the show?
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