GROSS - cinema history and criticism

GROSS EXTRAS - geopolitics, not trauma - The Long Good Friday

“The Mafia? I’ve shit ‘em.”

Sep 21 • Steve Bowbrick

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GROSS EXTRAS - for the 80th anniversary of David Lean’s Brief Encounter

After the war cinema everywhere became a humanist art form. But not in Britain.

Sep 16 • Steve Bowbrick

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August 2026

GROSS/66 1975 - Jaws - Spielberg’s suburban Moby Dick

Exemplary movie-making and extreme moral cowardice.

Aug 24 • Steve Bowbrick

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GROSS/30 1939 - Gone With The Wind - a Confederate monument

Rhett Butler is a Promethean hero

Aug 20 • Steve Bowbrick

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GROSS/15 1927 Napoléon - You will not remember the order of events but you will be in awe throughout

For the day of Napoléon's birth, 15 August, I'm republishing one of my favourite essays, about Abel Gance's vast project: an epic of national…

Aug 15 • Steve Bowbrick

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July 2026

GROSS/71 1980, part one - Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back

Darth Vader gives Area Manager.

Jul 25 • Steve Bowbrick

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May 2026

GROSS - the whole history of Hollywood and its ideologies - a guide for new subscribers

Dive into the archive - it's free and full of surprises from the whole history of Hollywood.

May 4 • Steve Bowbrick

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GROSS/70 - 1979 - Kramer vs. Kramer, part two - splitting up

How did divorce, the heartbreaking dissolution of a marriage, become the stuff of pop fiction and blockbuster movies?

May 1 • Steve Bowbrick

April 2026

GROSS/70 - 1979, part one - Kramer vs. Kramer: how marriage ends in the modern world

Peak divorce. In which we meet a caricature of liberated America and learn nothing.

Apr 22 • Steve Bowbrick

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GROSS/69 - 1978, part two - 3,000 words about the final 15 seconds of Grease

The strange apparatus of cinema…

Apr 1 • Steve Bowbrick

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March 2026

GROSS/69 - 1978 - Grease is a miserable thing but it has a magic realist ending that I can’t stop thinking about

You were probably in a school production of this strange and rather cruel story.

Mar 23 • Steve Bowbrick

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February 2026

GROSS EXTRAS - coming of age at the fin de siècle

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg is a European aristocratic fable resolved in a very Hollywood way.

Feb 27 • Steve Bowbrick

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