The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a strident Catholic evangelical text. And from 2025, when an aggressive and confident new Catholic fundamentalism has made its home in the Silicon Valley elite and in The White House, it looks scarily prescient. More of this in GROSS: bit.ly/48cxVO8

It’s almost 90 years old, it’s cheesy and it’s a travesty of English history but it became the model for every action movie that followed. The Adventures of Robin Hood was 1938’s top-grossing movie… bit.ly/3Lsn62Q

If you want a preview of the world imagined for us by the monarchists, accelerationists, integralists and AI oligarchs look no further than the Dune movies…

GROSS: Villeneueve's Dune - aristocratic excess: bit.ly/48EhUCq

"Money begets money, my dear…" Mercantile capitalism explained by a shifty-looking old gent during the Restoration. Honestly, Forever Amber is a brilliant movie - wildly silly - essentially the first bonkbuster and the biggest movie of 1947. bit.ly/4cjF001

The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a Catholic evangelical text. The film’s muscular Jesuit priests send the demon packing and heroic Father Karras sacrifices his own life in saving Regan’s, as a true priest should. The Exorcist is the next review in GROSS, the cinema history newsletter gross.ly

The Godfather is a melodrama and The Long Good Friday is an epic. Not going to argue about this. GROSS is cinema history with a bit of politics, a bit of historic context, sometimes some gags. bit.ly/4mGBYbm

There are so many movies and books and works of art from that period that reflect the odd, background dread that we all got used to - sometimes implicitly, sometimes right there in the plot. Andrei Tarkovsky's final movie, from 1986, makes it explicit. It's a beautiful thing: bit.ly/4l6GNJy