America
Harvey, Theatre Royal HaymarketTuesday, 24 March 2015
If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, repeatedly unfunny Harvey isn’t just a study of madness, but a punishing example of it. Mary Chase’s dusty 1944 farce about a man hallucinating a 6ft 3in rabbit... Read more... |
DVD: Man of the WestMonday, 23 March 2015
The 19 films directed by Anthony Mann between 1950 and 1960 included all 11 of his Westerns – five of them psychologically nuanced vehicles for James Stewart as an irascible loner scourged or mutilated for his obsessive pursuit of some goal. The... Read more... |
Buyer & Cellar, Menier Chocolate FactoryFriday, 20 March 2015
This is, stresses our guide, a work of pure (read: non-libellous) fiction, except that its “preposterous” premise is rooted in even more preposterous truth. In 2010, diva extraordinaire Barbra Streisand produced wildly narcissistic coffee-table book... Read more... |
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong NumberFriday, 13 March 2015
There are so many worthy, interesting, non-violent games in the world. And then there's this… this steaming hot mess of pulsing electronica, endless ultraviolence and drug-inflected hyper-visuals. This is the videogame the Droogs would have played... Read more... |
Wang, LSO, Tilson Thomas, BarbicanFriday, 13 March 2015
Michael Tilson Thomas is in town to celebrate his 70th birthday. And he's with old friends – he’s been working with the London Symphony since 1970, including six years as principal conductor. There is still plenty of chemistry here, and the... Read more... |
DVD: The Manchurian CandidateTuesday, 10 March 2015
“A frivolous piece of hysteria. I liked it in a confused sort of way but when it was all over I must confess I couldn’t really see the point.” So ran the Daily Express review of The Manchurian Candidate on 5 November 1962. Other fascinating... Read more... |
DreamcatcherThursday, 05 March 2015
We get the big city views of Chicago, the bright lights and the skyscrapers, a few times in Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, but for the most part we’re planted firmly down at street level, in areas of town probably you wouldn’t want to go to, a fair... Read more... |
CD: Tuxedo - TuxedoWednesday, 25 February 2015
I work in an office where music is generally played in the background. Picking the soundtrack for a Friday afternoon can be a particularly fraught moment: one person's idea of a wind-down from work and a promise of leisure to come can be too cheesy... Read more... |
It FollowsWednesday, 25 February 2015
David Robert Mitchell's second ode to innocence lost is a rather more twisted take on the subject than his first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover. That was a beautifully judged ensemble coming-of-ager which merely teased us with horror... Read more... |
CD: Public Service Broadcasting - The Race for SpaceWednesday, 18 February 2015
The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic... Read more... |
BlackhatMonday, 16 February 2015
From Michael Mann, the director of the monumental crime epic Heat and the original and best Hannibal Lecter movie Manhunter, this lumbering saga of cyberhacking is really rather disappointing. Not that it doesn't include several torrid action... Read more... |
Gruff Rhys, KOKOThursday, 12 February 2015
First there was the movie, the album, the book and the app. Now there is the tour. American Interior, Gruff Rhys’s postmodern narrative concept, has spread tentacles in any number of media. At the heart of it is the mythic story of John Evans, a... Read more... |
