Hello, this is the season finale of Everything Else, the FT Culture podcast.

I'm Al and I'm Gris.

This week we'll be arguing over our favourite films of the year and looking forward to the new films out this winter.

And later, Gris will chat to the actor Haley Atwell, star of a new BBC adaptation of Howard's End.

And we'll be back in the new year with a brand new series.

In the meantime, you can find us at facebook.com slash everything else podcast.

Okay, so a couple of episodes ago, we talked about the Me Too hashtag following the Harvey Weinstein allegations.

And since then, there has been a cascade of allegations across the acting world and beyond.

So we thought this would be a moment for us to look at the question, can you separate the artist from the art?

Yeah, when we last talked about this, that was before Kevin Spacey, Lewis C.K., many other people.

It's very sort of troubling to look at the, for example, the films that Weinstein is behind,

so the English patient, Shakespeare in Love,

cinema, paradisi, some of my favourite films, and think, like, can I watch those now

knowing that they came from this culture of kind of rape and sexual assault? Does that taint

those films? I think any knowledge, good or bad,

is bound to colour how we view a play or a film or any work of art. It is an argument that

some people have been making, though, that you should see the art as a kind of hermetically sealed

thing. The artist can be a sort of scandalous, awful person and they can still be great at making that piece of art.

I completely agree with that. These kinds of allegations, if they're proven to be true, will certainly taint the way we look at all of these films.

It is inevitably weird to watch Woody Allen's character in Manhattan, seducing the younger girl when we know about his seduction of his stepdaughter.

Does that alter the quality of the film?

I don't think it doesn't anyway.

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