Tag: satire
Auggie review – watchable hi-tech satire doesn’t quite know what to say
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The face of American character actor Richard Kind – melancholy, hangdog, a little dyspeptic – is exactly right for this high-concept midlife satire from director and co-writer Matt Kane. It’s a variation on a familiar...
The Man Who Sold His Skin review – art-world satire runs only skin deep
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Here is a muddled caper of movie that doesn’t know what it wants to say; it doesn’t work as a satire of the international art market, nor as a commentary on the racism of white European culture. And its attitude to Sy...
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner review – subversive satire
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“I’m Sterling. Lost my father to Aids, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservatism, my language to PTSD. Got this England, though. Got this body, this Sterling heart.” So begins Isabel Waidner’s Goldsmith...
Mona by Pola Oloixarac review – enjoyable if flawed satire
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You sometimes hear it said, usually by those looking in from outside, that the literary world is a cosy, circle-jerking kind of place. Oh, if only they knew! Like any human zone where access to power is to be had, the...
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn review – playful Romanian sex tape satire
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Romanian rabble-rouser Radu Jude takes on scolds, snitches and rightwing moralisers in this tart, teasing satire about a school teacher whose sex tape goes viral. The tripartite structure allows the writer-director to...
‘The end of western civilisation’: Triangle of Sadness director explains modelling world satire
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The shrieks of delight and horror greeting Ruben Östlund’s latest film, Triangle of Sadness, are a mark of success for its award-winning Swedish director, he said on Sunday, following the film’s Cannes festival premie...
TV tonight: head to Hawaii for a razor-sharp satire of rich Americans
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School of Rock’s Mike White writes and directs this razor-sharp satire of wealthy American holidaymakers who unwind and then increasingly unravel at a luxury resort in Hawaii. We open with meeting newlyweds Rachel (A...
Clybourne Park review – property prices and home truths in provocative satire
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Bruce Norris’s 2010 satire was written as a response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and, like that American classic, examines interracial tensions though the prism of property ownership. It begins in 1959...
Satire really has left the building when we’re asked to be kind to Ghislaine Maxwell
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In the long run-up to Ghislaine Maxwell’s now imminent trial on charges of procuring teenage girls for her late friend, Jeffrey Epstein, her lawyer has repeatedly objected to the accused’s living conditions. Last week...
The Every by Dave Eggers review – scathing big-tech satire sequel
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Kudos to Dave Eggers. In this follow-up to the admirable, big-tech, dystopian thriller The Circle (which you needn’t have read to enjoy the current book), he again squares up to the new enemies of everything untamed a...
From Russia with schmaltz: Moscow’s answer to Tate Modern opens with a Santa Barbara satire
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First Vladimir Putin came to visit. Then, for the second day in a row, the artists were turfed out of GES-2, a prestigious new arts centre built in a disused power station, as police and men in suits swarmed in for wh...
Brighton review – Steven Berkoff’s dated seaside satire is a washout
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The subject of this four-hander by the seaside is the changing face of Britishness. But Stephen Cookson’s film, adapted from Steven Berkoff’s 1994 play Brighton Beach Scumbags, is marooned in a weird cultural no man’s...
The 47th review – Bertie Carvel is devilishly good but this Trumpian satire feels too soon
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Donald Trump’s inner circle has, in Mike Bartlett’s satire, turned into a Shakespearean court of a near future in which the former president is back in the game. The script, best in its granular moments of comedy, ble...
Lapsis review – sci-fi satire targets the gig economy
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This sensitive but flawed sci-fi comic dystopia walks the strange new frontier of the modern gig economy that has also been explored by Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Nomadland. It takes place, like Boots Riley’s...
The Chair review – Sandra Oh is first class in moreish university satire
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For those of us who waited desperately over the increasingly dour Killing Eve for Sandra Oh to be able to show her comic as well as dramatic druthers (and whatever can be said about the essentially emetic Grey’s Anato...
Lighten up the satire? That’s a tall order when life is out-crazying the most vivid fiction
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In 1944, George Orwell got a letter from TS Eliot, a director at Faber, rejecting his political satire, Animal Farm. There were several reasons. First, it was not the right time. Also, said the creator of The Waste La...