CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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What about the victims?
CAROL TURNER points out the failure of the film Oppenheimer to face up to the real-life consequences of nuclear warfare
Color photograph of the Trinity test, 15 July 1945; J. Robert Oppenheimer (in light colored hat with foot on tower rubble), General Leslie Groves (large man in military dress to Oppenheimer's left), and others at the ground zero site of the Trinity test after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some time after the actual test.
[United States Army Signal Corps/CC; Federal government of the United States/CC]
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
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’s big-name, big-budget film, Oppenheimer, opened last Friday amid considerable interest. Within 24 hours international box office returns had topped $174 million. It has already been nominated for a variety of awards.
This three-hour film, which tells the story of the atomic bomb through the eyes of theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer, is a visually captivating and complex tale, with sufficient dramatic tempo to hold the audience’s attention over a long period.
The filmic success of Oppenheimer sits unhappily alongside its cinematic impact, however. It is, I believe, a flawed cultural creation.
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