Film
Jasper Rees
Getting on for three decades ago Lasse Hallström was introduced to audiences outside his native Sweden with My Life As a Dog. An emotionally continent, directorially restrained picture of the pains and pleasures of a rural childhood, it was Hallström’s ticket to Hollywood. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, featuring a coltish young Leonardo di Caprio, retained some of Hallström’s snappy weirdness when he moved into English, since when he has wandered into the mainstream and can’t seem to locate the exit. His signature is to take a popular work of fiction and coat it in a thin film of simplifying Read more ...
ash.smyth
On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.We’d missed the exhibition of French and British impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and some Englishmen), so we took the opportunity to wander aimlessly round the satisfyingly manageable building and reacquaint ourselves with that childlike enthusiasm for the Wonder House (as the natives call the Devon museum). Despite its rooms full of Egyptologica, taxidermised birds, Grand Tour bling, Congolese Read more ...