Reviews
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When she announced her “surprise” 8th album on social media this week, Taylor Swift described its subject matter as a combination of “fantasy, history and memory” told with “love, wonder and whimsy”. For the listener, this hits home around track three. “The Last Great American Dynasty” tells the story of Rebekah, a “middle-class divorcée” who marries a heir to the Standard Oil fortune and spends her widowhood - and inheritance - on boys, ballet and annoying the neighbours of her Rhode Island mansion. And then? “It was bought by me,” sings Swift, turning the song’s misogynist refrain of “who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’m for sure getting rid of it,” 34-year-old Bridget (cool, understated Kelly O’Sullivan, who also wrote the script; she was creatively inspired by Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird) tells her younger, casual boyfriend Jace (an endearing Max Lipchitz) when she finds out she’s pregnant.Alex Thompson’s realistic debut feature, full of fine performances from relatively unknown actors and acclaimed at SXSW in 2019, busts taboos with a light touch. There will be blood: menstrual blood, lots of it from the start, more consistently featured than in I May Destroy You. After Jace and Bridget have sex – period Read more ...
India Lewis
"Alone at Alexandra Palace" is a gift of this time, no compensation but some sort of balm to a world that is still so interior, with a long time to wait until any concerts can resume. The film begins with an emphasis on aloneness that is sustained throughout, Cave reading a fairytale-like story as the soundtrack to his walk through the black and gold of the empty Alexandra Palace.Surrounded by a pool of sheet music, his grand piano stands in the middle of the space, lit with an almost nostalgic warmth. In contrast, the songs themselves, even when they are more major than minor, are inflected Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is five years since Maria Schneider’s The Thompson Fields was released – and hailed as a masterpiece – so this new two-disc set has been eagerly awaited. It doesn’t disappoint. Data Lords is a major piece of work. This “story of two worlds” as the album’s strap-line has it, is two contrasting albums which inhabit very different emotional territory.The first of the two is entitled The Digital World. For many years, Maria Schneider has been an assiduous, forthright and highly articulate defender of the rights of creators in the face of the land-grab by the data companies. It is a subject on Read more ...
Owen Richards
Ever felt like you could express yourself more freely, if only you could get away from everything that made you who are? British romcom How to Build a Girl tackles this paradox in joyful fashion, using the 90s music scene as the backdrop for a journey of self-discovery, via every embarrassing mistake it’s possible to make.Based on Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows aspiring teen writer Johanna Morrigan, who dreams of leaving her Wolverhampton council estate for the bright lights of London. After winning the chance to review Manic Street Preachers for D&ME Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorrah shone a blinding light on the Camorra crime clans of Naples, and spun off an acclaimed film and equally admired TV series. This film version of his 2016 novel La paranza dei bambini (“The Children’s Gang”) isn’t in the same league as either of those, but its account of the way criminality is a kind of hereditary condition in some areas of Naples still packs a punch.Star of the show is 15-year-old Nicola (Francisco di Napoli), leader of one of the teenage gangs who scrap it out around town (the opening scene features a balletic fight in a shopping mall, with the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Sun bears and moon bears are probably doomed, so why bother? Wildlife trafficking is a hugely profitable worldwide criminal enterprise, with small charities (fingers in the dyke, anyone?) doing their best to stem the flow.The international charity Free the Bears operates in several south-east Asian countries, trying its best to save the sun bears and moon bears. In a pair of BBC Two programmes, over a year we followed the efforts of the conservationist Giles Clark to help his friend Matt Hunt (who runs Free the Bears) set up a bear sanctuary just outside Luang Prabang in Laos. Crucially Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This quirky little film about the Isle of Dogs (Channel 4), a vanishing fragment of the old London docklands overshadowed by the Canary Wharf skyscrapers while its traditional homes are usurped by new and unloveable tower blocks, presented a flavoursome line-up of rogues, jokers and eccentrics. Some families have lived there for 150 years, but now the community's future is under threat from property developers and big business.Local songwriter Hak Baker (pictured below), a rare Caribbean face in this white working-class world, helped the story along with his acoustic guitar ballads as he Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The strength of the response to the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter campaign has provoked some theatres to create provocative new work. Often, the keynote is personal feeling. One recent example is the Bush Theatre’s Protest: Black Lives Matter, which mixes extremely personal emotions with formal choices that make it very difficult to review the work as if it was just straight theatre. Now the Royal Court has come up with My White Best Friend (And Other Letters Left Unsaid), curated by playwright Rachel De-Lahay and director Milli Bhatia, an online festival — which took place on 13-17 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Drive-in comedy shows are now well into their groove (although sadly a couple of promoters have had to cut their losses because of poor sales at some venues), and distinct differences in approach to what's on offer have emerged. Clearly going for the upper end of the market is Dine and Drive Theatre, an old hand at curating outdoor events, whose USP is classy locations and food catered by top chef Tom Kerridge.And very nice my picnic bag was too, with a decent assortment on offer – rather like the mixed bill on stage, curated by Mark Watson (who MCs each event in Mark Watson's Carpool Comedy Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Khadija Saye was 24 when she died in the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, the same year that her series of photographic self-portraits showed in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: she was the youngest artist in a roster of well-established figures such as Joy Gregory and Isaac Julien.Claiming prescience in art is tricky and probably ill-advised, but still it is true that in the aftermath of Grenfell, In This Space We Breathe directly addressed the outrage of that disaster, in which the right to live and breathe freely at home had been so flagrantly violated. Since then, the murder of Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Missing the office? Or dreading the day you have to return? What’s your relationship to the people you work with and for, and how does it intersect with your personal life? Do your paymasters know you? Do they care about you? Are there days when the routine and the hierarchy of it all just feels like a spirit-crushing game?All of those notions, and many others, drifted through the imagination when you entered the unsettling world of the Institute. This hour-long film for the BBC was created and directed by Amit Lahav, founder of the much-admired physical theatre company Gecko, and adapted Read more ...