Both Cleanness and Garth Greenwell’s award-winning first novel, What Belongs to You, are set in Bulgaria, with a gay American teacher as the anonymous first-person narrator (Greenwell taught at the American College in Sofia from 2009 to 2015). In many respects, Cleanness is less clearly structured; it’s more like a collection of partly non-chronological short stories with recurring motifs.Greenwell has said that he sees the two books as intermingling and continuous, that he wrote parts of Cleanness while writing What Belongs to You, and that he sees Cleanness as a “kind of song cycle” with Read more ...

Want to enact mass social change? Make it about children. About their health, their prosperity, their future. Make it about men; their security, their wellbeing. Make it about society. What benefits are there for the economy, the home? Just for God’s sake, remember… it doesn’t work to fight for women alone.In a masterful analysis of the many histories of women’s work in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, historian Helen McCarthy’s Double Lives intricately broaches issues of class, race, social norms and of course, motherhood. “Slowly but unmistakeably”, McCarthy writes, “the wage- Read more ...

“They always try to break you down when you’re 17,” says queen bee Selah (Lovie Simone) in Tayarisha Poe’s impressive directorial debut. As leader of the Spades, one of the five Mafia-style ruling factions in the exclusive Haldwell boarding-school in Pennsylvania, Selah, with her waist-long braids and inscrutably cool managerial style, seems unbreakable. But not so fast. Here comes new girl Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), her sweet-faced nemesis.As a high-school movie, this is some way from Lady Bird, Waves or Mean Girls, though perhaps elements of those are at play, as are shades of Donna Tartt’s Read more ...

There are quite a few good things to be said for Julien Leclerc’s Earth and Blood. It’s a terse and uncluttered thriller which makes full use of its main location, a battered old sawmill in the midst of a dank expanse of forest, and Leclerc has rustled up a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of gangsters led by the intimidating Adama (Ériq Ebouaney). Best of all is his leading man Saïd, played as the acme of strong and silent by Sami Bouajila, a Leclerc regular who also appeared in the director’s recent pieces The Crew and The Bouncer.In fact Leclerc’s opening scene might be a little too good, since Read more ...

One person playing one instrument from home to the edification and delight of thousands: it's been a constant in these confining days, and well meant even if the sound isn't always up to it, a necessary substitute for live communication on both sides. But this is something else: an education, a detailed sharing of love and consolation which makes me wonder why other musicians haven't taken up the challenge (maybe some have, but I haven't heard about it). The fact is that few can match Jeremy Denk's ease of playing as he talks, his infinite knowledge of the richest sets of piano music in the Read more ...

Deep from the heart of Trumpland comes Cuck, a deeply unpleasant film about a totally repellent character. Directed and co-written by Rob Lambert, the film opened simultaneously last autumn in the States with Joker, with which it shares an overlapping interest in societal outsiders pushed to the brink and beyond by their pathologies. Weirdly, too, both movies feature ailing mums who demand to be bathed by their emasculated, increasingly unhinged sons – parts taken by Frances Conroy in Joker and a take-no-prisoners Sally Kirkland this time out. (Onetime Oscar nominee Kirkland also gets a Read more ...

Swaggering pirates, X marks the spot, a chattering parrot, “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum”? All present and correct. But Bryony Lavery’s winning 2014 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson for the National, directed by Polly Findlay, also features key updates and wonderfully creative ideas, plus a good blend of horror and humour. With a 10+ age recommendation, this lively two-hour piece is excellent lockdown family viewing.Crucially, the production’s gender rebalancing makes this fun for all: Stevenson’s protagonist Jim Hawkins becomes a thrill-seeking, androgynous, “smart as paint” girl, Read more ...

It’s hard to feel sympathy for a young man plotting to stove his prospective father-in-law’s head in with a hammer. But when Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) discovers his quarry is bull-necked cop Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev), this simple plan inevitably suffers violent complications. The ensuing sustained, gruesome slapstick recalls early Sam Raimi, as the antagonists swing a hammer, TV and power drill, sustaining cartoon damage. But Russian director Kirill Sokolov’s wittily grisly debut is about more than mayhem.His claustrophobic premise is skilfully expanded with character-building flashbacks Read more ...

The lockdown has been extended, but here's the good news: each week whereby we are shut inside seems to bring with it ever-enticing arrays of theatre from across the spectrum, from online cabarets to freshly conceived podcasts and all manner of archival offerings of tites both familiar and not. Below is an unscientific sampling of items of interest to look out for either at the moment or during the week ahead. Some theatres change over programming on Mondays or even midweek, so if the current link you have to hand seems to be to something else, hold fire and the title in question should be Read more ...

With influences as diverse as Hitchcock’s Vertigo to 2010’s Catfish, Safy Nebbou’s genre-splicing French-language feature, starring Juliette Binoche, comes loaded with a heady mix of cheap thrills and surprising psychological depth. And it’s a hoot from start to finish. Nebbou’s sixth and most accomplished feature is an adaptation of Camille Lauren’s 2016 novel, ‘Celle que vous croyez’. Binoche is Claire, a fifty-something literature professor, with two children from a failed marriage. We meet her being interviewed by a psychiatrist, Doctor Bormans (Nicole Garcia), the Read more ...

James Graham’s play Quiz was a hit in Chichester in 2017 and then made a much-admired transfer to the West End. Considering its subject matter – the fabled “Coughing Major”, Charles Ingram, who allegedly cheated his way to the titular seven-figure sum on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – it was a natural for TV.Under the suave directorial hand of Stephen Frears, Graham’s three-part adaptation of his play told the Ingram story with wit and sparkle, though sadly viewers weren't able to vote in the way theatre-goers were. It didn't just focus on the supposed crime and its aftermath, but also Read more ...

A camel is a horse designed by committee, they say; perhaps that explains why The Host, with several writing credits – adapted by Zachary Weckstein from a story by Laurence Lamers, screenplay by Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Lamers – doesn't really know what it is. Part suspense thriller, part crime caper, but mostly a Hitchcock rip-off (although I'm sure the creators would call it “homage”).It starts so promisingly, with Saul Bass-esque opening titles, but then we get into tale that becomes bogged down with trivial details. After being dumped by the married colleague with whom he has Read more ...