Thomas Sutcliffe

Back to basics: much of the charm of Fantastic Mr Fox is in its wilfully unsophisticated scenery

Tom Sutcliffe: It's good to be strung along

The Week In Culture

Recently by Thomas Sutcliffe

Tom Sutcliffe: Let's be clear about what we're eating

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

It hasn't really been a good few days for this Government, when it comes to the relationship between simple scientific facts and public health. Their commitment to giving the people the facts doesn't apparently extend to giving them facts that might contradict current political orthodoxies. But they do have a modest opportunity this week to show themselves to be on the side of useful scientific intelligence. Tomorrow, the House of Commons debates a 10-Minute Rule Bill put forward by the Labour MP Helen Southworth, in which she calls for a legal requirement for a uniform system of food labelling on the front of packaged food.

Tom Sutcliffe: It's time for tough love at the Tate

Friday, 23 October 2009

I tend to think of Bullets Over Broadway when I hear about collaborative artworks, Woody Allen's 1994 comedy being a near-perfect parable of the ruthlessness necessary for high artistic achievement. In the film, a mob enforcer with only rudimentary education (he burned his school down) is given the job of looking after a gangster's moll who has been given a starring part in a Broadway play in return for a hefty investment.

Tom Sutcliffe: It's time to admit flying is a luxury

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Forgive me Gaia for I have sinned – or rather I'm about to. This weekend I'm flying to Washington with a son – an 18th-birthday present inspired by his passion for the West Wing – and at a stroke every climate-friendly choice I've made in the last few years has been blown. No point feeling smug about driving a Toyota Pious (as my children mockingly call it). No real point either in wondering whether the solar water panels on the roof are ever likely to justify their existence or patting myself on the back for a quasi-religious devotion to recycling. I have, of course, paid the surcharge for a carbon offset, but if I'm honest I don't want to look too closely at the mechanisms of that scheme for fear of discovering that its only effectiveness is in persuading people to overcome their doubts about taking a flight in the first place. And there's absolutely no good pretending that this trip is an unavoidable necessity because it isn't. It's for fun and – beneath shifting and variable levels of guilt – I'm looking forward to it. Even the flying bit.

Tom Sutcliffe: When a film is not a film

Friday, 16 October 2009

When the Cannes organisers invited Disney/ Pixar to present Up as the opening film of the 2009 festival they made history.

Tom Sutcliffe: No fair trials in the court of public opinion

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

I heard the phrase "the Court of Public Opinion" quite a few times yesterday morning – prompted by interviews and discussions anticipating the fact that MPs were all going to get a letter from Sir Thomas Legg and a lot of them weren't going to like it.

Tom Sutcliffe: Art with the Midas touch

Friday, 9 October 2009

The Week In Culture

Tom Sutcliffe: Ban an image and the more it is noticed

Tuesday, 6 October 2009

I can't recall attending a redacted exhibition before, but by the time I got to Tate Modern's new show "Pop Life" it had, in the dictionary definition of that word, been put in an appropriate form for publication, at least as far as the police were concerned. The odd, chapel-like enclosure in which Richard Prince's Spiritual America is displayed was sealed off from gallery-goers while negotiations continued about the lawfulness of an image of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields, naked and precociously sexualised.

Tom Sutcliffe: The smiley face of extinction

Friday, 2 October 2009

The Week In Culture

Tom Sutcliffe: Drugs busts do little to crack the problem

Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Is there anything more depressing than a showcase drugs bust? There was a fine example this weekend when HMS Iron Duke made its way into the interdiction book of records by seizing five and half tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Colombia – an event that was predictably greeted as a triumph by the Armed Forces minister Bill Rammell and by the ship's captain, Commander Andrew Stacey. And, following the well-established rules of the drug-bust news item genre, we were then shown the secret compartment where the stash was found and given the estimated street value of the drug (in this case £240 million) – a piece of information that is never omitted, but always seems to me to send an oddly mixed message. Just look at how much this stuff is worth, it seems to say, and how relatively easy it is to hide it. Isn't this a business you should be thinking of getting into?