Asteroid City breaks the third wall, the fourth wall – every wall that’s ever been thought up by human showfolk to enable comprehension and clarity.  It breaks down the barriers of performance and drowns the lot in an incoherent soup of stylish surrealism and quirkiness for its own sake. 

As with advertising, so with politics.  You sell your message better when you leave out the sermonising and make the people laugh.  Barbie should have stuck to making jokes. 

‘The critics loved After Sun.  So did a friend who has a difficult relationship with her father. As for me, I began to wish I’d blundered into a mindless action movie instead.’

As a story about a man facing death it is tone-perfect, not saccharine, not depressing, not self-consciously arty and in the end – well, you know, the Brits do this kind of thing so much better than anyone else. 

I settled in for what promised to be an enjoyably sharp satire on the excesses of foodie culture – the fads, the follies, the ridiculously pretentious lingo, the vanity and egotism of its stars.  An over-the-top – but only just – black comedy inspired by places like Noma in Copenhagen or El Bulli in Spain.

Cate Blanchett deserves her Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the imperious, narcissistic, unscrupulous orchestra conductor Lydia Tar, whose professional brilliance and sleek personal style have made her a global celebrity.