Moviegoing

Hiroshima mon amour was released in 1959.

I was just twenty at the time

And only saw it—at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street—in 1962.

Now, over sixty years on, I’ve found it anew.

Has cinema in the meantime ceased to be an art?

Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer claimed it was no longer one.

(The screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday was her movie "moment in the sun.")

Pauline Kael, her great rival, played Devil's Advocate, the contrary part.

Now, naturally, they're both long dead and gone.

How best to put it? On connaît la chanson! †

But Penelope drank herself to death,

while Pauline presently had nothing new to say.‡

† "Same old story!"

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‡ The New York Times called Kael's announcement in 1991 that she was retiring from regular film-reviewing "earth-shattering."