If you write about the things put up on screens, people often ask what you are looking forward to. The Cannes Festival will soon begin, and there is plenty there I want to see—Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman for one (he’s a gentler director than he is an actor), Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner (with Timothy Spall as the painter), and new films by Cronenberg and Godard. But the screen event that I anticipate with most desire and dread will occur on Sunday, July 13, and it will come live from Rio de Janeiro. That afternoon two nations will contest the final of soccer’s World Cup. The international audience will be at apocalypse levels—a billion viewers. The action is as yet unspecified. Two teams have to be standing that last day. I’ll take Brazil and England, though the odds on one are much better than on the other.

But that won’t be a movie, you say. Why not? It is on a screen; it will be about two hours long; it will be by turns beautiful, desperate, glorious, tragic (especially if England is there). What more do you want? And it will be live. If you were to ask me today whether tonight I want to see the lost Orson Welles version of The Magnificent Ambersons (about 138 minutes) or Liverpool v. Chelsea, I’ll take the game because it’s live. What more do you want? Welles can wait—as he has done for seventy-two years.





Yes, this is a review, and it does involve a movie. On April 13, to open a series of sports documentaries, ESPN (one of our last great studios) played Daniel Gordon’s picture, Hillsborough. It was the most moving film I have seen this year.

Hillsborough is in Sheffield in England. There is a soccer ground there where Sheffield Wednesday play. On April 15, 1989, it was the venue for a semi-final match in the English Cup competition. The game was between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and it was stopped after six minutes. At one end of the ground, where there was provision for standing-room spectators, the police, alarmed by the size of the crowd, had opened an external gate that allowed people to push into the ground and onto the terraces. It was the end of the ground reserved for Liverpool supporters, because soccer by then was trying to separate rival fans for fear of violence. Some of the Liverpool fans had no tickets. I daresay some had been drinking. I can believe that many of them were young men, unemployed, using their benefit money to make the trip to Sheffield.

Too many people got into the areas that the police called pens. There was surging enough to lift people off their feet. Metal barriers crumpled. Ninety-six people would die that day or thereafter from the crushing pressure. Fans spilled onto the pitch and many police stood by helpless: there were no cutters to break the chain-link fencing, no ladders, so that people could have been freed. There was little in the way of immediate medical care. The game was stopped. A disaster was occurring in front of the BBC television cameras covering the game. Within minutes, the police were putting out a story that fans had broken through the outer gates, that they had been drunken beasts. Days later parts of the British press claimed that some Liverpool fans stole money from the bodies of the dead and urinated on the police.