America
Sarah Kent
Spanning a hundred years, the Dulwich Picture Gallery's show of American photography is a twofold delight. Most of the great names are included, so practically every picture is a masterpiece of the medium and together they flesh out a story of cities in a constant state of flux and change. This is not an exhibition about buildings and cityscapes, though, so much as the people who inhabit them. And the most striking aspect of this look at city life is the squalor and grinding poverty in which so many Americans have lived for much of that time.The show starts with Alfred Stieglitz who, intent Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalised, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with. He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.If only the same could be said of Dominic Sessa, who repurposes his debut performance as a surly youth, a cocktail of ego and insecurity, from The Holdovers. It’s easy to see why Sessa would be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of Taylor Sheridan’s all-female CIA special ops unit finds the war on terror cutting uncomfortably close to the bone, with team boss Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) targeted by a bunch of thuggish Russians in her own home in Virginia. Scenes of Joe being violently manhandled and strip-searched by her attackers as they search for the locator device they know is concealed somewhere on, or in, her body make for pretty gruelling viewing, even in a show that doesn’t shrink from graphic violence.However, even that pales into insignificance by comparison to the combat scenes in the opening Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This is Nicola Benedetti’s fourth opening concert while she has been in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and I suspect it might be the one she’s most proud of. That’s not (only) because it featured All Rise, the jazz symphony written by the superstar jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (who is also Benedetti’s husband), but because it seemed to unite all the things Benedetti has previously striven for in her opening concerts. Like the rest of them, this pushed the envelope beyond the standard western classical canon, combined diverse musical forces, and focused on themes of building Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s an incendiary one-woman monologue to be had from Christine Lahti’s 2018 book about the misogyny of her upbringing, but The Smile of Her feels rather like an early draft of it. Lahti performs it with great candour and pops of dry humour, but you feel it could be even more arresting.Her book of essays, True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age, looks at different aspects of her life from early days to middle age (she is now, unbelievably, a sprightly 76). Somehow she has condensed this swathe of experiences into a 90-minute monologue, but inevitably this means Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
At every turn in Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man, references to other stories pop up. There are the murderous sexual shenanigans of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a squad of Italian-American punks who could hold their own on the mean streets of West Side Story, a duelling cars scene from Rebel Without a Cause, even hints of Puccini’s Il tabarro. What it definitely isn’t, and deliberately so, is a representation of Bizet’s Carmen, while grounded in its superb music.This disjunction may be why I find the piece tricky. Hearing re-orchestrated extracts from the poignant arias Bizet gave Micaela Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
FRIDAY 24 JULY, by Guy OddyEven for a festival whose whole purpose is to platform a rich range of artists from cultures all around the world, WOMAD 2026 is seriously on top of its game for a new start at a new venue deep in the heart of rural Wiltshire. The 2000-acre Neston Park, created in the 1790s, proved a beautiful setting that mirrored the excellent acts and fine weather. It's certainly no Womud and sunscreen is at something of a premium during long summer days.
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Similarly, the food on offer is consistently off-the-hook and the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.Why did this woman in her late seventies decide to sue, 30 years after the assault? The documentary goes a long way towards answering that question, though essentially the answer is that Trump repeatedly defamed her after she made allegations of rape against him in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Marissa Stapley and telly-ised by screenwriter/creator Jonathan Tropper, Lucky is a rip-roaring tale of dysfunctional criminal families, enlivened by a batch of splendid performances from an excellent cast. Front and centre is Lucky herself (full name Luciana Armstrong), a compulsive thief and skilled con artist, played quite brilliantly by Anya Taylor-Joy.As it happens, Lucky is the daughter of another inveterate criminal, her father John Armstrong, and as we see in various flashbacks, she was (as Joni Mitchell put it) raised on robbery. As she admits, her situation is Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow. The honourable intent is to savage gun laws and the attention Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Aaron Copland’s gleaming, monumental Fanfare for the Common Man was written to mark the USA’s entry into World War II. Those thunderous drums and soaring trumpets symbolised the moment when America formally announced itself as the greatest power in the world and its most ardent champion of democracy. How poignant, then, to hear it as a resonant opening to this year’s BBC Proms, in a programme that celebrated America’s 250th anniversary while reminding us that we no longer know what this superpower stands for. Nonetheless, in the moment, the crashing tam-tam and the crescendoing brass provided Read more ...