GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels
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A brilliant performance
LOUIS BAYMAN admires Mike Leigh’s bleakly comic take on a black woman’s experience of depression that offers no easy answers
TOUR DE FORCE: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths
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CHRISTOPHER POLLARD explains how and why neoliberalism adopted the racist agenda common to the populist right of today
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there
GUILLERMO THOMAS is persuaded by a scathing critique of the Church of England and its embeddedness in imperialism
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Materialists, Unmoored, Together, and Bambi: A Tale of Life in The Woods
TONY BURKE revels in the publication of previously unreleased tracks by the great US folksinger
GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience
IF you were to ask a computer programme to come up with a title for a new Mike Leigh film it could do no better than Hard Truths.
Echoing the title of his very first film in 1971, Bleak Moments, Hard Truths represents a variation on the veteran British director’s recurrent theme of the delusions that keep us a step away from despair.
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