Reviews
Adam Sweeting
In 2010, Maxine Peake starred in The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, but this new dramatisation of Lister’s life has been gestating in Sally Wainwright’s brain for 20 years, and finally arrives under the auspices of the BBC and HBO. Hugely entertaining it is too, not least its rollicking folkabilly theme tune, and its story of a buccaneering polymath, adventurer, businesswoman and pioneer of lesbian liberation now finds itself fortuitously timely.Suranne Jones steps boldly to the plate in the title role (“Gentleman Jack” was a mocking nickname), blowing through the staid social world of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Much of Rokia Traoré’s set on Saturday night comprised folk songs about Mali’s warrior kings, connecting with her country’s fabulously wealthy, proudly powerful past. They suit this diplomat’s daughter’s regal stature, which she has put at the service of a nation still enviably rich in musical resources, but battered by civil war, poverty and terrorist attack.Traoré has also helped give this year’s Brighton Festival an Afrocentric perspective, ignoring the comfortingly familiar in favour of often black British or African artists. Her commitment as Guest Director extends to three headline gigs Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a toothsome treat for Sunday nights and one of those rare occasions when the BBC has got hold of the kind of nifty comedy series that Netflix usually pumps out. What We Do in the Shadows started out as a New Zealand vampire flick in 2014. Two Kiwi friends, comedian Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi (who went on to helm The Hunt for the Wilderpeople and most recently Thor Ragnarok), created it. Their affectionate portrait of the every-night life of a house occupied by squabbling vampires living in downtown Wellington became something of a cult hit.Now comes the spin-off tv series Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a real passion project; British filmmaker Andy Dunn spent years building up a relationship with the late American photographer Harold Feinstein, filming him at work and interviewing friends, family and colleagues. The result is a loving portrait of a remarkable man. Perhaps it could have done with more judicious editing of the accolades and a little more probing of Feinstein’s darker side, but it is well worth seeking out by anyone with an interest in the history of photography. Feinstein grew up in Brooklyn in a first-generation immigrant Jewish family. He left home in his teens Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Al Murray's Pub Landlord character has been around since the mid-1990s. As such, it's a wonder that Murray has managed to reinvent the embittered, xenophobic loudmouth so many times, but he has – and the EU referendum in 2016 should have, you may have thought, given the character new life or killed him off altogether.What has happened, though, as Murray's latest show Landlord of Hope and Glory proves, is that the Pub Landlord has entered a state of stasis. Three years on from that seismic vote and after the UK was supposed to have left the EU, Murray has a dilemma. He could go with Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Once the self proclaimed poster girl for mental illness, Ruby Wax has evolved her stand up act, because, as she puts it, “everyone has mental illness now. It spread like wildfire.”It’s a tongue in cheek reference to the current supposed "fashion" for speaking up and out about mental health with the aim to de-stigmatise and taboo-bust – something that Wax has contributed hugely to over the years, by bravely opening up about her own journey to let other people know that it was OK to not be OK.Having left showbiz to pursue a Masters Degree in mindfulness based cognitive therapy at Oxford Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There’s a touch of Fellini’s 8 ½ in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film. It’s a forlorn, confessional tale, with Antonio Banderas starring as Salvador Mallo, a director in the latter stages of his career. His character acts as a cypher for Almodóvar, allowing him to wrestle with themes of love, loss, and addiction.Mallo is in a rut, unable to write or direct due to numerous ailments that plague him, from migraines to back pain. He’s been asked to attend a retrospective screening of his one of his films. This event leads to him being reunited with the film’s star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia). They had Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road cost $15.9 million. It also happens to be the site of a now-demolished pink-washed house owned by drug lord Pablo Escobar until his killing in 1993. Reputedly, the Colombian cocaine king stashed treasure in secret hidey-holes here, as at his other properties. When the wreckers came in 2016, they found two well-hidden safes – one of them later stolen. All true. On this terrain of bizarre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was inevitable that Rod Stewart’s distracting solo adventures would eventually kill off Faces, the band he fronted. Less predictable was the departure during their lifetime of another founder member, their bassist and key songwriter Ronnie Lane. A hint the split was coming arrived in late 1972 when Lane and Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood recorded the soundtrack music to the film Mahoney's Last Stand while their band began work on the Ooh La La album.At that point, Stewart was then riding high with his Never a Dull Moment album, a US and UK smash. In March 1973, the singer churlishly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It would be great to herald this low-budget drama about an elderly drag queen and his friendship with a young gay singer-songwriter as a little gem of British indie cinema. But Tucked, which aims to be an odd-couple tale of heart-warming redemption, is pretty dispiriting with its slow pace and predictable plot. We first meet Jackie belting out ‘I Will Survive’ wearing inch thick make-up and heels. He's telling tired, misanthropic jokes about sex in a nightclub. He's the oldest tranny in town and even before the titles appear, he's being told that he has terminal cancer and weeks to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Shows by Gravity & Other Myths fall into the realm of “contemporary circus”. It’s an off-putting moniker, bringing to mind a performance where there’s no clowning but quite possibly much “thought-provoking” interpretive dance. The decade-old troupe from Adelaide, Australia, appearing tonight in Brighton’s Dome Theatre, deliver a show that is certainly contemporary circus, but they reinvent the term in in a riveting, entertaining way.Proceedings begin with the house lights coming up to reveal the stage cluttered by a rack of clothes, a line of steel buckets, a suit of armour and more. It’s Read more ...