There’s been a lot of talk recently about crying in the cinema, mostly spurred on by the release of Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 3’. If you haven’t seen it (shame on you, it’s been out for weeks and it’s brilliant) I won’t ruin the ending, but I will say that you should be prepared to feel your eyes misting over (if not a complete fit of bawling). Yet as I sat there, it suddenly stuck me just how strange what was going on around me was. We were a group of hundreds of strangers, crammed together in a darkened room and unleashing a level of emotion that we usually try and keep from almost everyone.

Think about it. Outside of the cinema, how many people have seen you cry (infancy not included)? I think I can count the number on my digits. Maybe that’s just me being some sort of emotionally repressed tin man figure, but I don’t think so. I have at least some friends and have only been around three or four when they have been crying. And furthermore, how often do you cry at all? Of course some people are more open with their emotions than others, but I’d guess that, for most of you, crying isn’t a daily or even weekly occurrence. Thinking back over maybe the past five years I’d say there’s a realistic chance that I have cried more in the cinema than not (the more I write, the more I think that I: a. must spend less time in cinemas and b. seriously rethink parts of my life). Now this is probably not the case for you, but the ratios must be a lot closer than we might expect.

So what is it about the cinema that does it to us? Are our emotions so easily the playthings of directors and producers that they can exert some sort of Derren Brown mind control on us? We are all totally aware that the characters in front of us are fictitious, yet they are producing a reaction in us that we save for the most real and personal times of our lives. In the ‘Toy Story’ films they don’t even look like people, having instead been generated by a man sitting for hours alone in a room with a computer. This realisation verges upon the creepy.

But it’s not really that, is it? The people in Hollywood know that they cannot simply pull a lever that says ‘Poke Tear Ducts’ and produce films that will set their audiences off. Instead it is empathy that makes films connect with us emotionally. The end of the trial in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ (which has been freely available to watch for nearly 50 years – if you haven’t seen it, shame on you) makes me well up every time I see it. As the black community of Maycomb stand to show their silent respect for a man who has tried in vain to push against a wall of prejudice, I begin to blub, and I’m lucky if I haven’t stopped by the end of the film half an hour later. It’s fairly obvious that I am not living in 1930’s Alabama, nor do I have any experience of suffering under such racial prejudice, but the film is convincing enough to transport its audience to a world where everyone can understand and be moved by the tale. It is empathy that I feel, not for the fictional characters but for what they represent: the far too real spectre of prejudice.

This is why it’s ok to cry at the cinema. The tears aren’t for the story that’s being weaved but for the realities behind the curtain. It is why you probably won’t see anyone cry at ‘Alien vs Predator’ – it’s rather difficult to empathise with Aliens, Predators or one-dimensional humans. The films that make you cry are, more often than not, the really good ones. Real thought and emotion must be put into the characters for you to be taking any out.

As I was watching the end of ‘Toy Story 3’, I noticed something quite strange. The group of children sitting in the row in front of us, whose attention had been fixated throughout the film suddenly seemed
to lose interest in the last moments. Feet were swinging, arms waving and one even removed his 3D glasses. The last scene means nothing to children still playing with their toys, while it means everything to those of us who’ve reached the day where they must be put away. For our generation, the empathy runs even deeper; it’s not just the symbolism of Woody and Buzz, but a genuine loss of a brilliant set of characters and films that we must also let go. There are few more important things to have a good cry about than that. And don’t worry about anyone seeing. Chances are the person next to you is weeping behind the 3D glasses as well.

As you take your seat for this most recent staged version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, you will first notice a cat in tight black furs playing a violin and swinging on the bars of a cage. A Soviet-style placard will boast the name of the capital where the action takes place: MOCKBA (Moscow).

The setting is 1930s USSR in the arrogant age of atheism. But with the arrival of the Devil and the recent “publication” of a work on Pontius Pilate, the Soviet characters of the play are thrown into the dark and twisted world of the religious and the magical.

The whole design of the play is clever and sexy, with ostentatious make-up and costumes against a minimalist backdrop. A great performance of Margarita by Cassie Barraclough conveys the stifling atmosphere of this bureaucratic nation; she is a woman struck down by love for her Master, a severe hero character played by Ollo Clark. The fated lovers must have dealings with the ominous crowd of the Underworld in order to at last regain their freedom.

There is music intermingled with straight theatre and, although the cast are not a professional dance troupe, the exciting choreography makes a very stimulating and enjoyable watch. Matt Monaghan curiously pulls off his role as a talking cat, and Satan himself (Max Hoehn) is as much a comic anti-hero as he is treacherous.

There are moments of sobriety when the labours of a young Christ are seen in detail. Jonnie McAloon looks pure and tortured in his role of Yeshua, fighting the cynicism raged against him by Pontius Pilate (Joe Bayley), and these ordeals of the Biblical beings are paralleled by the agony of the modern lovers. Yet this is a political satire which should entice some laughter, and so the director manages to steer the tone of the play from the sombre to the height of absurd.

The plot is slightly unhinged by the rapidity of the story-telling, and the jumps between dialogue and musical farce are disorientating, but none of these criticisms weaken the play as a whole. The acting is strong and this adaptation of the Bulgakov novel by the student crew is ambitious and praise-worthy. The play is not in real-time and may be deemed complicated, but my advice to the viewer would be to leave rationale behind at the Box Office to become submerged in this world of madness and beauty.

The Master and Margarita is playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival C Soco Venue, August 6th-August 30th. Go to www.oudsdobulgakov.com for details.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is effortlessly cool. He came to prominence capturing the clubbing scene of the 90s and in 2000 went on to become – with critics voicing just the right amount of indignation – one of the youngest artists to win the Turner prize, and the first to do so with photographic stills. But to describe something as fashionable is to duck one question and to raise many more. Fortunately Tillmans’ new retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is proof of substance to match the style.

Tillmans’ casual approach (no doubt an agonised affectation) is almost his undoing. Some pictures are taped to the walls, others held up by big bullfrog clips. Tillmans is testing the boundaries of gallery art, challenging our expectations of photography and installations; but what was revolutionary for his Turner show is now in danger of becoming lazy and predictable. While the presentation brings an important sense of intimacy, tangibility and spontaneity to the exhibition, it also highlights a certain incoherence at its heart. The Serpentine Gallery is a beautiful space, but it is also a slight one. Its four rooms, gloriously lit by the sun streaming in from Kensington Gardens, demand tight editing. Tillmans instead adopts a kitchen-sink approach to his retrospective. A clear structure is hard to pick out.

It seems, however, that this is precisely the point. The artist is not presenting a particular theme or interpretation, because that is not how life works. Tillmans is at his most dull when he is at his most obvious, as three mixed-media collages in the central room make plain. On flimsy plywood tables, recalling half-hearted museum vitrines, Tillmans illustrates issues such as the persecution of homosexuals, but the stories told give too much away. Far better are photojournalistic works such as Heptathlon. Here a superficial blandness becomes an insistent and compelling call to probe further. Is the athlete’s distant gaze one of intensity or apathy, focus or detachment?

Tillmans photography has an egalitarian medium, which is to say that anyone can take a picture of anything. Such is the quality of his eye, however, that this never becomes a boring or indiscriminate principle. Eierstapel shows a precarious tower of battery eggs in crates. Hardly promising, but the play of light off the eggshells gives the photograph a pristine, pixellated luminosity. For an artist who made his name with shoots for fashion magazines like the Face and i-D, the power of Tillmans’ nature photography is striking. Though he retains a keen commercial eye (as a night-time picture of Times Square illuminated by Nike signs shows) these shots are merely insipid advertising in comparison to compositions such as Nanbei or the Wald series. The latter, a collection of blurred sepia C-prints, gradually reveals the outlines of a dense forest. It is impenetrable, majestic, and somehow threatening.

The range of subjects covered across Tillmans’ career has led the artist to focus increasingly on the act of observation itself. His more recent work, centring on the chemical processes of photography, is a real success. Constellations of colour-saturated abstractions dot the walls. Huge prints show the creation of colour in Tillmans’ darkroom, as chemicals spread across canvas like blood through water. Here are the beauty and magic of photography’s basic materials.

The strongest piece, Dan, unites the figurative and the abstract elements of Tillmans’ work. A man reaches to the ground, caught in an oblique, balletic pose. The photo seems off-angle; it has a strange momentum of its own as limbs and a background of crawling ivy orbit a shock of orange hair. Not all the exhibition works as well, but on form Tillmans has a singular ability to reconcile culture and nature, the fashionable and the fundamental.

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2. Until 10th September. Admission free.

Throughout the history of cinema, an ancient and relatively ignored phenomenon has existed, and occasionally flourished, right under the noses of innocent movie-goers. It facilitates the production of truly terrible films (not such an extraordinary occurrence in Hollywood, admittedly), yet incredibly, its jurisdiction is not restricted by space or time. Instead, this cinematic, syphilitic Time Lord is able to visit previous masterpieces and irrecoverably damage them beyond all recognition, rendering them forever unwatchable. And most curious of all, it is a phenomenon which appears to stem from an unwittingly suicidal impulse in filmmakers. It is, for want of a better term, directorial retroactive sabotage.

Put more simply, it is the act of a director making such a bad film, such an atrocious, insulting, awful, diarrhetic plop of a movie, that all his or her previous films, regardless of their quality, are immediately tarred by the same brown brush. They become terrible merely by association. This is, thankfully, a relatively rare occurrence, but can be observed nonetheless, so long as the director’s style is consistent. If certain techniques that were employed so successfully in one film are then used to unintentionally terrible effect in another, the quality of the former unfairly takes a hit. It is perhaps most noticeable, and certainly most notorious, in the case of George Lucas. The original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy became the Bible for certain lonely, fat boys (and some girls), and for thirty years, it remained, for them, an infallible and utterly perfect gospel by which to live their lives. They would wear a dressing gown around the house with the hood up, in slovenly imitation of a Jedi, they would make lightsaber noises whenever wielding anything long and thin (‘ooh, matron’, etc.) and they would practice for hours in front of the mirror, trying in vain to perfect the self-assured cockiness of Han Solo. But then, after three decades of happy obsession (and a good deal of crippling loneliness), George Lucas waddled back onto the scene to announce three new films, all written and directed exclusively by him.

The subsequent disappointment is well known and documented extensively, including the memorable over-reaction of one fan who, upon exiting a screening of ‘Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace’, cried out to the waiting journalists, ‘George Lucas has raped my childhood!’ You’d think the title’s multiple colons would have offered him a clue beforehand as to where the artistic inspiration for the film originated from. For those who had worshipped the original trilogy, it was as if God had cashed in on the record-breaking success of his first book and written ‘The Bible 2: Jehovah’s Revenge’, in which Jesus comes back to Earth as a ninja to snap the necks of all the unbelievers, whilst having his magic powers explained away by midichlorians. Leaving aside the fact that a ninja Jesus would be awesome, the fact remains that for millions of people, the gospel of their youth had been torn to shreds.

Although it’s painful, we must stay on George Lucas a few moments longer (after which we shall rapidly dismount him), for he is also one of the few directors in history to go back and substantially tamper with his previous films. Ignoring the nasal, asthmatic protests from his fans, Lucas physically and knowingly engaged in retroactive sabotage. Not only this, but his big sweaty hands were also not restricted to just one franchise. Working together, he and Spielberg dual-handedly pulled the good name of Indiana Jones through the mud with the thunderously stupid ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’. The title once again reflects the film’s quality, over-long, over the top and thoroughly unmemorable as it is. Fortunately for us, the previous films have just enough charm and resilience to survive this ordeal, while the sheer awfulness of the fourth film serves as a reminder of just how good the previous instalments were.

Unfortunately, retroactive sabotage is not restricted to films of one franchise. If the director’s style is distinct enough, his entire back-catalogue can be ruined. The most glaring example of this would be Quentin Tarantino, who, after two masterpieces (‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’) and one underrated gem (‘Jackie Brown’), came dangerously close to volunteering this violent, sweary and magnificent triumvirate to the unforgiving retroactive treatment with ‘Kill Bill’. By upping the violence, foul language and stylistic ticks while accompanying it with an infantile and shallow script, Tarantino was placing his earlier work in grave danger. Fortunately, his three best films pretty much survived this treatment, just as they had survived the flood of imitation Tarantino films that infected cinema in the late nineties, with their non-linear narratives, pop culture dialogue and a bit of the old ultra-violence combining to no real effect. Yet Quentin is nothing if not persistent, and so, three years later, he triumphantly unveiled his coup de grâce: ‘Death Proof’. Appropriately enough, it involved several enormous car crashes. In one fell swoop, Tarantino rendered utterly impotent everything that had made his first three films so stylish and impressive, and his failure offered yet another example of this tragic cinematic phenomenon.

For would be filmmakers, there is one of two possible lessons to be learnt here. You must either avoid a noticeable style that pervades all your films, thus neatly avoiding the possibility of accidentally ruining your earlier work – as exemplified by Danny Boyle, Rob Reiner, Alfonso Cuarón and many others – or, if you insist upon maintaining a distinctive style, you must also maintain a high quality for all of your films. Very few manage the latter option, though some have succeeded, including Guillermo del Toro, Pedro Almodóvar and Christopher Nolan. Yet even if a filmmaker ignores these options and does commit retroactive sabotage, that is not necessarily the end of the story. Quentin Tarantino may have shot himself in the foot (and other more painful places) with ‘Death Proof’, but, against all odds, he managed a magnificent return to form with ‘Inglourious Basterds’, bringing his first few masterpieces back to their original quality. It is perhaps the first example of a new and encouraging phenomenon: retroactive redemption. One can only hope it catches on.

It’s finally August; the time of year when we tentatively place our umbrellas in our respective cupboards and venture out into the great British summer. And for film lovers, this can only mean one thing. That’s right, we throw caution to the wind and book our tickets for open-air cinema.

Up and down the country, thousands of people are perching themselves before vast screens, under the canopy of Britain’s temperamental sky and, optimism permitting, you could be one of them. To celebrate this mass act of faith, we bring you the five best outdoor venues with the most student-budget friendly prices.

What: The Scoop at More London

Where: London

When: 15 September – 1 October

http://www.morelondon.com/events_details.asp?ID=73

The sunken amphitheatre by City Hall will this year play host to what can only be described as a random selection of films. There’s high suspense machismo in the form of Oscar winning The Hurt Locker and heartwarming family animation in Pixar’s Up. There’s also Dirty Dancing, but the less said about that, the better. And it’s completely free, although it operates on a first come first serve basis so get there fast and hold firm to your seat.

What: Screenfields

Where: Manchester

When: Up to 9 September
http://www.spinningfieldsonline.net/app/whatson/spinningfields.cfm

Manchester’s first outdoor cinema and another free venue (unless you want to push the boat out and hire a deckchair). Highlights include Miyazaki’s beautiful Spirited Away and iconic romance in The Quiet Man.

What: Chichester Cinema at the New Park

Where: Chichester, West Sussex

When: 14 August

http://www.chichestercinema.org/film/804/My-Fair-Lady-FREE-OPEN-AIR-SCREENING-NO-NEED-TO-BOOK

If the upbeat romanticism of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady just isn’t quite enough for you at an indoor cinema, see it free in the Chichester Cathedral grounds under the stars – weather conditions and light pollution allowing.

What: Purbeck Film Festival at Corfe Castle

Where: Corfe Castle, Dorset

When: 27 – 28 August

http://www.purbeckfilm.org.uk

August Bank Holiday sees the screening of a youth orientated programme at Corfe Castle. Relive your childhood with the locally filmed classic Bedknobs and Broomsticks for £5 a ticket. Lets just hope the special effects haven’t aged too badly.

What: Conkers Open Air Cinema

Where: Moira, Derbyshire

When: 7 August

http://www.visitconkers.com/events/t/performing-arts-events/open-air-cinema-mamma-mia-87.html

If any film was made for an outdoor screening, it’s probably Mamma Mia. For £5 you can sing-a-long, laugh at the questionable vocal talents of the cast and hopefully have an all round good time in the National Forest.

Half of you, I reckon – the half with a ‘Y’ chromosome – must have seen the South Park episode Go Go God, where Richard Dawkins comes to the school to teach the theory of evolution. Mr(s) Garrison’s response – “if I’m a monkey, I’ll act like a monkey” – is to fling her faeces at him. This is humour at its cheapest, but it’s strangely satisfying to watch. Many who have been on the receiving end of Dawkins’ polemics feel that the biologist-turned-polymath has been flinging faeces around for the last five years. Live by the turd, die by the turd.

I apologise for the scatological start to this review, but bear with me a moment. You see, the trouble with the religion-science controversy in the 21st century is that it has hardly been a controversy at all. On a global stage, with primal emotions running high, it has all too often descended into a shit-slinging match. Fortunately, it seems, times are a-changin’. Last term’s excellent edition of the Oxford magazine Exposition featured an article charting the attacks on the New Atheism from within the scientific community. Tightly focused critiques of the methods and assumptions of the most prominent attacks on religion, they are almost unanswerable.

And now Marilynne Robinson, who won the Pulitzer Prize with her novel Gilead and the Orange Prize with Home, has walked into the debate like a seasoned UN negotiator entering a border dispute in sub-Saharan Africa. The first rule of conflict negotiation is to point out that there is no conflict, and this is exactly what Robinson does in Absence of Mind.

The springboard of her argument is that the polar opposition between science and religion is banal. “The great quarrel in modern Western life,” she writes, “is said to be between religion and science. They tend to be treated as if there were a kind of symmetry between them, presumably because of their supposedly Manichean opposition.”

Modern critics of religion either fail to define what they are attacking, or otherwise define it as a behavioural phenomenon. Even when they look at individual religious feeling, Robinson argues, they simplify it to a pathology, as though belief in God were a form of mental illness. This is a “hermeneutics of condescension”: “to condescend effectively it is clearly necessary to adhere to a narrow definition of relevant data.”

We neglect the experience of faith – what it feels like to be more certain of a transcendent belief than of one’s own hands and feet, as Cardinal Newman put it. “Scientific” atheist thinkers tend to dismiss it because their brand of rationalism is founded on the belief that a thing either is or it ain’t. If you can’t measure and objectify its existence, they maintain, it must be hokum. Robinson thinks that this approach is unscientific. Quantum mechanics and modern cosmology have shown that the fibres of the world itself are as fragile as dreams: reach out to touch them, and they slip behind you. If you can’t measure the position and velocity of a sub-atomic particle at the same time, you can ill afford to scorn other modes of knowledge.

Absence of Mind argues that reality is intensely subjective. The way things are is closely linked to the way we think and feel they are. Robinson wants the self – the way we experience the world around us – to be brought back to the heart of science. She calls for a science that embraces the full complexity of concepts instead of reducing them to generalisations and quantifiable phenomena. This means taking pre-Enlightenment – and even pre-Socratic – thought seriously. “In culture as in nature,” she writes, “there is no leaving the past behind.”

This is a profoundly powerful thesis. Like all the best works of philosophy, it brings you back wide-eyed to what you already knew. True, Robinson is not innocent of the odd volley of faeces-flinging, but her rigour and openness redeem this book. Like some vast sacred river, Absence of Mind wanders disconcertingly across the plains and massifs of world history, leaping over precipitous non sequiturs and bubbling out of unexpected troughs, but ultimately reaches its end with a calm momentum.

The tragedy of this book is that it is simply too difficult for anybody used to Dawkins’ prose style to digest. There were too many sentences where I understood every word and just couldn’t fit them all together. It’s a horrible experience. You sit there, and you move all the ideas around in front of you like a child with the pieces of some jigsaw puzzle, but somehow they won’t quite fit together and all you get is the vaguest impression of the picture. I felt like Cecile in Bonjour Tristesse when, faced with a single impossibly enigmatic sentence of Bergson, she flees in revolt from the whole world of seriousness and academic strain.

If you – like me – are not acquainted with the entire history of Western philosophy from Plato to Pinker, fasten your seatbelt for a turbulent ride through concepts you only half understand. Positivism, for example, seems to mean so many things in so many different spheres that it is almost meaningless. Three pages of clear explanation would be more welcome than the single word “hermeneuticization.” This is not really Robinson’s fault – she is dealing with a field of writing that bears as much resemblance to practical modern English as Cicero’s translations of Greek bear to contemporary Latin, a world where abstract nouns wind up doing horribly contorted things to other abstract nouns. Still, as a novelist she might have simplified her expressions without losing any of the richness of her arguments. Absence of Mind is only 135 pages in length, but it would be a quicker read if it were twice as long.

Anyway, buy it, read it, puzzle it out, disagree with it, misunderstand it (as I probably have), love it, despise it. A book like Absence of Mind is valuable not so much for itself as for how the world responds to it. It’s a book that’s worth hating.

The curtain rises to reveal Jeff Goldblum as Mel Edison, hunched over in his living room at 2.30am, rocking back and forth and muttering, ‘God… God… God…’. He is a man undergoing an existential crisis, bitterly unhappy and uncomfortable in the world, but unable to discover any one cause. His wife wakes and tries to comfort him, but his melancholy and his rage are unshakeable. He pounds on the wall of his neighbours, retches at the smell of garbage from sidewalk and is certain that he is about to lose his job in the midst of a recession. It might be advertised as a comedy, but in its opening moments, The Prisoner of Second Avenue seems nothing of the sort. Instead, it seems that the audience is in for an updated Ivanov for the 1970s, with laughs in short supply. Yet after a few minutes of Goldblum’s manic pacing back and forth and his unstoppably rapid delivery of lines, this revival of Neil Simon’s 1971 play reveals itself to be about as funny as theatre gets, albeit as black as funny gets.

The story revolves around a middle-aged couple, Mel and Edna Edison, who live alone in a New York apartment, their daughters having gone off to college. Their surname suggests a pioneering American spirit, but throughout the play, success or even optimism is nowhere to be found. Instead, they exist in a city suffering under prolonged garbage strikes, an unbearable heatwave and an enormous surge in criminal activity, and there seems to be no escape. As the recession puts their jobs in jeopardy and the water supply is sporadically shut off, innumerable and unrelenting waves of misery are lined up for the married pair. For these two New Yorkers, the American Dream has long gone stagnant.

In the midst of all this, Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl are thoroughly convincing as Mel and Edna, sharing a remarkable chemistry that hints at years of marriage. Although the press has mostly focused on the show as a vehicle for Jeff Goldblum, this is undeniably a two-hander; both actors bring their own unique form of neurosis to their roles, and complement each other perfectly. And neuroses really does sum this production up. With Goldblum’s nervous breakdowns, whiney complaints about the air conditioning and loathing of his neighbours, the play would not look out of place in the oeuvre of Woody Allen – it shares much of his style of humour, and, more significantly, feels thoroughly rooted in time and place. From the old-school news reports to the understated costumes, the audience is transported straight to 1970s New York as it approaches bankruptcy. Yet while the period setting is subtle and convincing – due in large part to Terry Johnson’s excellent direction – its comedy, drama and underlying themes all have a startling contemporary relevance. Mel’s fear of unemployment is one that strikes a chord with audiences in 2010, and the trials and tribulations that he and Edna undergo are timeless, being struggles within themselves as a couple.

The play’s greatest emotional strength lies in its understated development of the relationship between the husband and wife. They bicker, fall out and don’t even touch each other for much of the play, but the sense is always there that theirs is a genuine and loving relationship. It is a realistic, unsentimental but ultimately tender portrayal of two people struggling to stay afloat in the unforgiving currents of urban life. While its wit remains bitingly sharp and intelligent throughout, the masterstroke of this production is found in its understated moments of pathos, culminating in an unexpectedly poetic and beautiful final image. It is a shame this play won’t be running for much longer – it closes on 25 September – as this is an emotional, witty and timely revival. See it before it disappears too soon.

The show is playing at the Old Vic’s Vaudeville Theatre. £12 admission for under-25s.