1970s
David Benedict
What’s that? Joan Crawford had no sense of humour? Well, take a look at It's A Great Feeling. It’s a pretty bizarre (and pretty bad) 1949 musical with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves running round the Warner Brothers lot attempting to make a picture. For reasons too daft to explain, they want to turn waitress Judy Adams (Doris Day) into their leading lady and all three wind up at a swanky gown shop. Doris disappears to try on a red gingham number, when who should pop up in a fur stole knitting what looks suspiciously like a baby bootee? Real-life Joan.Appalled by Read more ...
David Nice
The meanderings and bickerings of an extraordinary mother and daughter as they roam or lounge around a semi-derelict house and overgrown garden on Long Island have become a cult since the 1975 release of Albert and David Maysles' documentary Grey Gardens. "The Big" - as singing "mother darling" calls herself here - and "Little" Edie Bouvier Beales have been much impersonated, not least by drag artists (Jinxx Monsoon on the ever-amazing RuPaul's Drag Race won the film legions of new gay fans). Is there more to tell about what already seemed a little bit too much of a good thing?Absolutely. Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“We have come here tonight,” announces Mavis Staples, “to bring you some joy, happiness, inspiration - and positive vibrations!” It’s a declaration that the irrepressible Mavis, celebrating her 79th birthday today, routinely makes at her concerts - and she never fails to deliver.Tonight is the second of two sold-out nights at Islington’s beautiful Union Chapel, a much-loved venue that’s perfect for Mavis’ brand of joyous, reverent and powerful music and one she clearly adores. She’s played here a few times, including a special show on her 75th birthday in 2014. “It’s my birthday,” she Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The most intriguing aspect of the mid-Seventies, Memphis-based band Zuider Zee isn’t that they took their name from a geographic feature of the Netherlands or that they dealt in against-the-grain Anglo-centric pop rock or even that the new compilation Zeenith features top-drawer music which was never released at the time. It’s that their path never crossed that of the similarly minded and perennially lauded local outfit Big Star.In the liner notes to Zeenith, Zuider Zee’s Gary Bertrand says “We had no interaction with Memphis groups, none at all.” His bandmate Richard Orange goes further: “We Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day. The evening proved almost as notable for who didn’t attend (feminists Kate Millet and Gloria Steinem refused to debate him) as who did (Germaine Greer, Lesbian Nation author Jill Johnston), but its electric anarchy resonates powerfully in today’s confused world.The Wooster Group – under the simultaneously deadpan and excoriating eye of its director Elizabeth LeCompte – has been Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The invaluable work being carried out by the Wim Wenders Foundation to preserve the legacy of the great German director continues to bear fruit. In 2012, with the help of the World Cinema Foundation, Wenders bought back his entire back catalogue (which he had lost in associated bankruptcy proceedings a decade earlier), and the process of 4K digital restoration began.The challenges – much more than just repairing images drawn from some very tired original prints (though that was considerable work too, as an accompanying extra here, Restoring Time, reveals) – were particularly demanding in the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You need to be of a certain age to recall the sheer ubiquity of Studio 54. For a few years in the late 1970s, even the sterner British newspapers were routinely stuffed with stories of who was there and what went on within the hallowed citadel (if not who went down, and on whom). As for the New York prints, publicists were on a bonus scheme incentivising them to get the hottest discotheque onto front pages.As explained in a new documentary, for a couple of years after the US pulled out of Vietnam Studio 54 was a watering hole which attracted not wildebeest, zebras and antelopes but exotic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“He’s not a sideshow attraction,” we hear towards the end of Marc Meyers’s queasily compelling My Friend Dahmer, when one of the “Dahmer Fan Club”, a group of high school sham-friends-cum-taunters who have been treating the film’s teen protagonist as if he was just that, has second thoughts. Encouraging him to throw pretend fits – they call it “spazzing” – first around school, later in public, they have seen it as some sort of “cool” provocation, a hilarious disruption. The bullied outsider Jeff appears content to go along with it, gratified by the semblance of inclusion that it seems to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Here to be Heard, made by US film-maker and punk rocker William E Badgley, has such a juicy, pertinent story to tell that it never palls. Over 84 minutes, contemporary interviews and old footage build a two act drama that reveals The Slits to be one of the most underrated bands of their era. Alongside bemusement at music that was ahead of its time, this is mostly down to the fact they’re women. “The reason there are hardly any girl rock’n’roll stars,” says front-woman Ari Up in a decades old interview, “is because most girls are not strong enough in their own minds.” Facing the raw sexism of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
Owen Richards
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts. Created with genuine passion, authenticity, and a dream list of guests, this documentary series proves to be essential viewing.Shad, an established rapper in his own right, became obsessed with hip hop in the 90s, but wants to go back to where it all began: the Bronx, hip hop ground Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was a time when Hugh Grant was viewed as a thespian one-trick pony, a floppy-haired fop dithering in a state of perpetual romantic confusion. But things have changed. He was excellent in Florence Foster Jenkins, hilariously self-parodic in Paddington 2, and he’s brilliant in A Very English Scandal (BBC One) as smooth, treacherous Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. At moments, he even manages to look uncannily like him.Thorpe himself would doubtless have dreamed of pulling off a similar feat of reinvention, but for all his success as a revitalising force in the Liberal Party, his goose was Read more ...