America
DVD/Blu-ray: DetroitTuesday, 09 January 2018
Detroiters razed sections of their own city as surely as Rome did Carthage, during five summer days in 1967. It took, amongst others, the 101st Airborne – victors at the Battle of the Bulge, then just back from Vietnam – to crush America's worst... Read more... |
Hostiles review – powerful but preachy Frontier fableFriday, 05 January 2018
The last time we saw Christian Bale in a western, he was playing the downtrodden rancher Dan Evans in James Mangold’s punchy remake of 3.10 to Yuma. No doubt it was valuable experience for his role in Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s smouldering flashback... Read more... |
Best of 2017: FilmFriday, 29 December 2017
It was the night Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, those old robbers on the run, will want to forget. Thanks to a clerical error, the Oscar for Best Picture briefly ended up in the clutch of the overwhelming favourite. Then the mistake was spotted and... Read more... |
Little Women, BBC One review - life during wartime with the March sistersThursday, 28 December 2017
One of the much-hyped jewels in the crown of the family-friendly BBC holiday season is this new three-episode adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's much loved novel by Heidi Thomas, the writer of Call the Midwife. We started in the New England winter –... Read more... |
Molly's Game review - Jessica Chastain gets her poker face onTuesday, 26 December 2017
After her brittle and unloveable turn in John Madden’s Washington-lobbyist drama Miss Sloane, Jessica Chastain gets the chance to do it again, properly. This is thanks to Aaron Sorkin, whose directing debut Molly’s Game is. More to the point, his... Read more... |
Hamilton, Victoria Palace review - rich, radical and ridiculously excitingSaturday, 23 December 2017
“Are you aware that we’re making history?” demands Alexander Hamilton in the show that has finally made the lesser-known Founding Father an international household name. And whether its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, knew it when he wrote that line or... Read more... |
The Greatest Showman review - the great huckster as song and dance manWednesday, 20 December 2017
The real-life PT Barnum was a mixture of impresario, hustler and exploiter, and Elvis Presley’s huckstering manager Colonel Tom Parker would surely have viewed him approvingly. However, he also was also a temperance campaigner and a reforming... Read more... |
Blu-ray: CarrieTuesday, 19 December 2017
As we reach December, the year of Stephen King comes to a close with this 4K Blu-ray restoration of his very first film adaptation: Carrie. It was the first major success for Brian De Palma, Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, but how does the original... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2017: Rising Appalachia - AliveMonday, 18 December 2017
2017 has been a time of change if not turmoil, on both personal and political stratospheres. So the music of two sisters whose jam is made up primarily of protest and healing songs, is the perfect antidote.When chaos abounds, the relentless... Read more... |
The Twilight Zone, Almeida Theatre review - from hokum to humanityWednesday, 13 December 2017
Director Richard Jones watched all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone as research for this Almeida production. I've never seen a single one, to the amazement of the American fan on the tube home who saw me reading the programme and, having grown up... Read more... |
Blue Planet II, BBC One review - just how fragile?Monday, 11 December 2017
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter... Read more... |
The Melting Pot, Finborough Theatre review - entertaining moralsThursday, 07 December 2017
Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot characterises Europe as an old and worn-out continent racked by violence and injustice and in thrall to its own bloody past. America, on the other hand, represents a visionary project that will “melt... Read more... |
