America
Adam Sweeting
Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There comes a point in I Saw the TV Glow when the repressed high-schooler Owen (Justice Smith) smashes his television’s screen by trying to dive into the box itself, to cross the great divide between his numbed reality and the feminine supernatural fantasy-land of his favourite series.Bursting into the room, Owen’s brutish widowed father (Fred Durst) pulls him from the wreckage. The scene is a metaphor for gender dysphoric Owen’s inability to start transitioning into a girl, a block that will leave him emotionally crippled. That is the nub of Jane Schoenbrun’s dazzling second feature, not so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” urged King Lear, accompanied by the Fool, on the blasted heath. But that’s not quite snappy enough for the storm-chasers of Twisters as they drive their souped-up four-by-fours across the tornado-blitzed flatlands of Oklahoma. Their motto is “if you feel it, chase it!” which is pretty much all they do for the movie’s two-hour duration.So OK, it isn’t Shakespeare, but Lee Isaac Chung’s movie, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, sustains a hectic and frequently hysterical pace while delivering oodles of gobsmacking footage of terrifying storms threatening Read more ...
Liz Thomson
You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.If the smell of Gauloises and Lillet were of necessity left to the imagination, Peyroux and her four-piece band provided a 90-minute transport of delight to the near-capacity audience that was, surprisingly, notably older than the singer Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before Lucas Hnath wrote Red Speedo, he had heard a 2004 speech at a hearing investigating baseball doping that declared the practice “un-American”. That started him thinking about the concept of fairness. After the play had been produced in New York In 2016, another politician was boasting that Americans were going to win such a lot, they "might even get tired of winning”. Red Speedo inhabits the ground between these two positions and is a timely arrival at the Orange Tree, just as athletes prepare for the Olympics, where performance-enhancing drugs may well crop up as an issue. But a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s an exuberant comedy from the start in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, which comes to London after an initial Covid-truncated Off Broadway run which brought her a Pulitzer prize in 2021. Roy Alexander Weise’s production puts in all the energy it can find and then more, doing its best to balance that comedy with the more serious themes, such as family responsibility, and a man’s role in the world, with which it is interspersed.It’s a balance that the production does not finally quite achieve, however, with an extended first half dominated by the kitchen banter of four Memphis friends, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Fans of American playwright Annie Baker’s work know what they are likely to get in her film debut as a writer-director: slow-paced interactions between characters thrown together in a confined space – a workplace, a B&B, a clinic – where long bouts of silence are not uncommon and little happens but everything important somehow gets said. Janet Planet is classic Baker in this respect. In some scenes, the birds and crickets make more noise than the humans, and whirring fans get solos. There’s also music, a rarity in a Baker stage production, here mostly coming from car radios or home Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.In the stand-up hour filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn-born comic muses on a range of subjects – mostly sex, politics and relationships – but also riffs on Disney princes and the things that annoy her Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The artist Bill Viola died, after a long illness, early in the morning of Friday 12 July. I had the privilege of getting to know him while making a documentary about his life and work in 2001-2003. He quickly became a friend, as did his wife Kira and his sons, Blake and and Andrei. He felt like a kind of brother, who’d grown up through the same changes that shook culture up in the 1960s and 70s. Although he was American, I felt that we spoke the same language.I’d become interested in video art – the principal domain of his work – in the mid-1970s. I wrote about it, persuaded the BBC to give Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Apparently when actress Maika Monroe first saw Nicolas Cage in his full Longlegs get-up, her heart-rate skyrocketed to 170 bpm (her resting heart rate is 76). Or at least so a promotional video tells us. Whether true or not, it’s an example of the savvy marketing campaign, courtesy of distributor NEON, that has drummed up a genuine sense of anticipation for Oz Perkins's latest film. A handful of glowing early reviews and whispers from early screenings confirmed that Longlegs was the summer’s must-see horror film. I can confirm that a movie inspiring such overblown rhetoric does, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s over 50 years since men last landed on our orbiting space-neighbour, but director Greg Berlanti's Fly Me to the Moon transports us back to the feverish days in 1969 when Apollo 11 was about to tackle the feat for the first time. The film’s promo material rather misleadingly bills it as “a sparkling rom-com”, but it has a few other strings to its bow. For instance, it’s partly a satire on American capitalism and the advertising business, takes a few sideways glances at the Vietnam war, and has inherited some of the DNA of a political thriller.It’s an eccentric mixture, but it works thanks Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau’s 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional workplace drama, though in a much gentler key than Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. But this slow burn catches fire.The first sign that this is not a lightly comedic tale of an endangered urban workforce comes when a young worker called Dez (Branden Cook, pictured below, bottom right)) produces a handgun from his backpack and stashes it in his padlocked locker in the break room. But again, this is not Chekhov. The gun will not fire.Dez’s place of work is an ailing car assembly Read more ...