Christopher Bray

How The Sopranos changed TV for ever

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Peter Biskind describes how a once despised medium became the definitive narrative art form of the early 21st century. But has it now passed its peak?

Four disparate intellectuals

5 August 2023 9:00 am

Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism

There’s nothing ‘magical’ about a great theatrical performance

4 March 2023 9:00 am

The actors who appear to be doing nothing are now the ones most revered – but acting is natural, says David Thomson: it’s what we all do all the time

As normal as blueberry pie: Oscar Hammerstein II, through his letters

10 September 2022 9:00 am

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and…

The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…

Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on

15 January 2022 9:00 am

‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…

Shades of grey

8 January 2022 9:00 am

In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of…

‘I wonder about his humanity’: Malcolm McDowell on Stanley Kubrick

17 October 2020 9:00 am

Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…

Houdini looks bound to captivate us forever

16 May 2020 9:00 am

Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…

David Bowie: the boy who never gave up

11 January 2020 9:00 am

A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up…

A sublime lyricist, but no letter writer: Cole Porter’s correspondence is sadly wit-free

26 October 2019 9:00 am

‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking’, carolled the company of Cole Porter’s 1934…

Proper adult entertainment: Claude Rains, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), with taut dialogue by Ben Hecht

The invisible man behind Hollywood’s greatest films

20 April 2019 9:00 am

What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch,…

The Finnish-American actress Maila Nurmi, who created the 1950s character Vampira.

The vampire’s role in Marxist philosophy

3 November 2018 9:00 am

‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t…

: Clancy Sigal and Doris Lessing, sitting together on a London bus

‘Steer clear of that cave boy, James Dean, and grease ball, Elvis Presley’

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously…

Adam Gopnik (image: Getty)

Art and aspiration

21 October 2017 9:00 am

When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…

Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep

Band of bickering brothers

7 October 2017 9:00 am

There aren’t many downsides to being a film critic, but one of them is being asked to name your favourite…

Making Nietzsche New

30 April 2016 9:00 am

Had you been down at Naumburg barracks early in March 1867, you might have seen a figure take a running…

Groucho Marx (Photo: Getty)

When Groucho Marx lectured T.S. Eliot

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Groucho Marx was delighted when he heard that the script for one of his old Vaudeville routines was being reprinted…

Orson Welles: ‘I started at the top and worked my way down’

Homage to awesome Welles on his centenary

12 December 2015 9:00 am

One day in May 1948 in the Frascati hills southeast of Rome, Orson Welles took his new secretary, Rita Ribolla,…

An early photograph of Sinatra, the flute-thin crooner.From Charles Pignone’s Sinatra 100 (Thames & Hudson)

Frank Sinatra never went away — but did he ever grow up?

7 November 2015 9:00 am

‘He never went away. All those other things that we thought were here to stay, they did go away. But…

What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…

Tippi Hedren helps save schoolchildren in The Birds. Hitchcock confided to François Truffaut that he’d had ‘some emotional problems’ with Hedren during the shoot. For the final scene, live birds were attached to Hedren’s clothes. The actress became increasingly hysterical over the course of the week it took to film it, and when a bird finally went for her eyes, she collapsed

A profile of the worlds’s most famous film director — with the most famous profile

18 April 2015 9:00 am

‘Do it with scissors’ was Alfred Hitchcock’s advice for prospective murderers, though a glance at these two biographies reminds us…

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1946

Jean-Paul Sartre was perhaps the 20th century’s most famous thinker - if you can get beyond the verbiage

7 March 2015 9:00 am

Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if…

Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?

29 November 2014 9:00 am

On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…