bloodshed

The Sackler family wanted their name to be synonymous with art, high-brow prestige and patrician good taste. But despite or because of their vainglorious donations to art galleries and museums all over the world, it became synonymous with something else: pain. And perhaps also with the ugly business of converting agony into money, while leaving behind more poverty and more agony among their abject American customer-base than there was before. Part of the Sackler family were behind the Purdue Pharma corporation marketing…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeIt’s hard to quite comprehend the scale of the North American opioid crisis. The rise of the hyper-addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin – a “blockbuster drug”, in putrid Big Pharma parlance – has led to more than 600,000 deaths in the US and Canada since 1999. Experts have predicted that as many as 1.2 million more people may die from opioid overdoses by the end of the decade.…

The part of the Sackler family behind the company Purdue Pharma have become notorious for their addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin which blighted innumerable American lives, while the Sacklers culturewashed the resulting colossal profits with conceited museum donations. There was hardly a museum in any first world capital city that didn’t salute their narcissism with a “Sackler wing” or a “Sackler courtyard”. Their story was first substantially told by the New Yorker’s investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in…

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.This week, the British film magazine Sight and Sound revealed the results of its latest once-a-decade poll of the greatest films of all time, surveying more than 1,600 critics, programmers, curators, academics and archivists for their top-10 lists. For the first time, the winner was Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which topped the…

If you had to put money on who would be cast for a film about 15th-century Czech warrior hero Jan Žižka, then Ben Foster, Matthew Goode, Til Schweiger and Sir Michael of Caine would probably not be top of the list. But that is the impressive ensemble kitted out in ermines and armour by director Petr Jákl for this brutal, byzantine but strangely uninvolving historical actioner set in medieval Bohemia – apparently the most expensive Czech production ever.Foster plays Žižka, a seasoned mercenary who with his merry band of…

Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic gets its first German-language adaptation for the screen, after the Hollywood versions of 1930 and 1979; it’s a powerful, eloquent, conscientiously impassioned film from director and co-writer Edward Berger. Newcomer Felix Kammerer plays Paul, the German teenage boy who joins up with his schoolfriends in a naive patriotic fervour towards the end of the first world war, excitedly looking forward to an easy, swaggering march into Paris. Instead, he finds himself in a nightmare of…