America
The Brutalist review - we're building to somethingThursday, 23 January 2025
There’s a moment, as we build to a climax in Brady Corbet’s first film, The Childhood of a Leader (2015), when a servant at a grand house unwittingly nudges a candle into the path of a dangling curtain pull. The tassel ignites, unseen by gathering... Read more... |
Tiffin Youth Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Jurowski, RFH review - perfect detachment suits public statementsTuesday, 21 January 2025
When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days after the concert. There is no bad time for a tricky commemoration of... Read more... |
David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)Monday, 20 January 2025
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Mikey and NickyTuesday, 21 January 2025
The blurb that accompanies this Criterion Blu-ray calls Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which co-stars John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as scuzzy, low-ranking gangsters on the run from their bosses, “an unsung masterpiece of American cinema”. For once,... Read more... |
A Complete Unknown review - how does it feel?Friday, 17 January 2025
Being unknowable has been almost as much of a preoccupation for the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman as writing songs. Previously on film he has played the role of Alias in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, having first presented himself to... Read more... |
American Primeval, Netflix review - nightmare on the Wild FrontierMonday, 13 January 2025
It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set in the 1850s, and is based around the real-life massacre of settlers travelling from Arkansas to California by... Read more... |
A Real Pain review - Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin take a Holocaust tour of PolandWednesday, 08 January 2025
Jesse Eisenberg's first film as writer/director was 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, which met with modest acclaim. But he’s taken a giant leap forward with the follow-up, A Real Pain, which has been hoovering up critical plaudits from... Read more... |
Album: Snoop Dogg - MissionaryWednesday, 08 January 2025
Sometimes magic really can’t be recreated. However hard it’s strived for. The incendiary magic that was Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg three decades ago has not been conjured again in this long-awaited reunion. There are sparks of genius, for sure, and some... Read more... |
Nickel Boys review - a soulful experimentSaturday, 04 January 2025
RaMell Ross’s feature debut follows his poetic documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) in again observing black Southern teenage boys, this time in Sixties juvenile prison the Nickel Academy, where beatings and unmarked graves... Read more... |
Best of 2024: Visual ArtsMonday, 30 December 2024
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2024: Kenny Barron - Beyond This PlaceMonday, 16 December 2024
Kenny Barron’s Beyond This Place is glorious. Whereas I’ve found some of the more talked-about albums of 2024 either been uneven or unfocused – as if attracting debate is more important than just setting out to make a great album –... Read more... |
Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes review - a Hollywood legend, warts and allSaturday, 14 December 2024
It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here... Read more... |
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