Tag: culture
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Not Like Us, review
The following was my 2025 entry for the Anthony Burgess Prize… In Not Like Us, Kendrick Lamar delivers a devastating diss track, a club banger, a workout song and a treatise on cultural appropriation all at once. Taking aim at his long-term rival Drake, the zingy composition which uses samples from Monk Higgins’s 1968 jazz…
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Thank you, foreign-language films
I don’t speak Japanese, French, Spanish, Korean or Hindi. But, thanks to the low-tech intervention of subtitles, I’ve been able to watch and enjoy several excellent films in these languages over the past 18 months. Godzilla Minus One, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, is as engaging as it is aesthetically pleasing.…
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Top Boy, review
The following was my 2024 entry for the Anthony Burgess Prize… The conclusion to Ronan Bennet’s sprawling crime drama Top Boy is abrupt, unsatisfying, and raises many more questions than it answers – which is what makes it perfect. That Netflix wanted the show to “carry on forever”, according to its lead Ashley Walters, is…
Rohan Banerjee 