Culture flash: heatwaves

This week's news in the artsIf you want to generate suspense, the relentless pressure of a heatwave – and its promise of a cathartic thunderstorm – always make a splendid frame for any story. Yet somehow the idea has been reused classily enough to avoid the putrefaction into cliche.Hitchcock's Rear Window, with its symbolic lifting of the heat in the final reel, is a particularly clear example of how hot weather can be used for atmosphere. In the Coen brothers' odder idiom, Barton Fink does ...

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