MatthewClayfield.com

Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.

Cat on a spinning Victrola

Cat on a spinning Victrola

A couple of years ago, for the briefest of moments, I was a bit of an expert on Simon Stone. Which is rather to say that, for the briefest of moments, I had arguably seen ...

Apr, 26 · in Criticism,Theatre
Juan Jose Padilla

Beyond the bull in Pamplona

When Australians think of Pamplona—and especially of other Australians in Pamplona—they are liable to conjure up mental images of drunken backpackers drenched pink with sangria, running down a street in terror as several tonnes of ...

Beyond Representation: Hollywood, the Holocaust and the Image of History in ‘Schindler’s List’

Despite its Academy Award for Best Picture and its substantial commercial success, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) remains a critically contested film. This essay looks at a number of its stylistic and dramatic strategies, as ...

Apr, 11

Happy to cut the cord and stay off the grid

I have no phone. I have no internet connection. I am twenty-eight years old, a so-called digital native, and the wired world is my God-and/or-Jobs-given birth right. And yet like US Homeland Security Secretary Janet ...

Mar, 28

Gold Coast makes good

Seven years ago when I left Queensland’s Gold Coast, where I studied, I left behind a culinary wasteland: milk bars where the air was thick with vaporised fat, fish and chip shops with blue and ...

Jan, 12

Nuanced critique of nihilist Russia

In the lead-up to the March 4 Russian presidential election, which Vladimir Putin won in a landslide amid allegations of fraud, Foreign Policy magazine published an article by Thomas de Waal titled ‘How Gogol Explains ...

Dec, 12

Walking the streets of Hebron, a city cleaved in two

I meet Shehada at his home early in the morning and we set off with his friend and neighbour, Isa, in the direction of Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city. It should by rights be ...

Oct, 31



While I am lucky enough to get paid for my work, independent foreign correspondence remains very expensive to produce. Please consider donating a few dollars to help me with my upcoming projects.
  • RT @stuwillis: @PennyRed @mclayfield aka Moffat's trouble with women. He's got a troubling sexist streak if you read interviews.
  • Rewatching UNFORGIVEN as part of a twenty-film-or-so month of Westerns.
  • RT @PennyRed: The problem is- Moffat's is no longer about time and space and adventures. It's about The Doctor and his relationships with women.