America
Mob Land review - familiar pulp fictionSaturday, 26 August 2023
Optimistically billed as John Travolta’s comeback, writer-director Nicholas Maggio’s debut is an effective Southern noir, with Travolta an authoritative but peripheral presence.Mob Land is mostly about Shelby Connors (Shiloh Fernandez), a small-town... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: CHOO CHOO! / Blood of the LambSaturday, 26 August 2023
CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★Nye and Duncan seem to live a charmed life. Clad in primary-coloured dungarees, they begin their days with a song, and see what adventures... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Dark Noon / Concerned OthersWednesday, 23 August 2023
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a... Read more... |
Harlan Coben's Shelter, Prime Video review - what the hell is going on in Kasselton, New Jersey?Tuesday, 22 August 2023
Netflix scooped up the rights to an armful of Harlan Coben’s standalone novels for a colossal sum, and now Amazon Prime has nipped in and signed up Coben’s series of Mickey Bolitar books, which fall under the “young adult” heading. Shelter is the... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Thieves Like UsTuesday, 22 August 2023
Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman’s 1974 evocation of 1930s Mississippi, wasn’t a commercial hit on its original release, even though Pauline Kael called it a masterpiece.This Depression-era tale of a trio of hapless bank-robbers was shot on... Read more... |
Blue Beetle review - radical rehashSunday, 20 August 2023
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable,... Read more... |
Haunted Mansion review - corporate craftSaturday, 12 August 2023
A Disney theme park ride adaptation remake is a challenging place to make your mark, and the dumping of Guillermo del Toro for promising real, supposedly child-freaking scares dampens hopes further. Replacement director Justin Simien (Dear White... Read more... |
Album: Rhiannon Giddens - You're the OneSaturday, 12 August 2023
In late 2019, BC, another age, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi stepped on to a Southbank Centre stage and gave one of those mesmerising performances that forever stays in the memory.In the three years or so since, Giddens has been given a... Read more... |
Alone at Night review - cam girl meets crowbar killerMonday, 07 August 2023
The vogue for star ratings fixed to film reviews arrived after the heyday of exploitation movies, which is perhaps just as well because the whole point of such films is that they’re good and terrible at the same time.Like Schrödinger’s cat in... Read more... |
The Beanie Bubble review - an under-stuffed, misshapen product sagaSaturday, 29 July 2023
Another week, another toy story, in the wake of Barbie. And another origin-of-hit-product story, too, after Air. The Beanie Bubble, though, has none of the surprisingly gripping appeal of Nike’s rise and rise via a single trainer design, nor the (... Read more... |
Special Ops: Lioness, Paramount+ review - high-octane female cast conducts war on terrorWednesday, 26 July 2023
If you want to get a hit show on American TV, you could do a lot worse than recruit Taylor Sheridan to create it for you. Special Ops: Lioness, a bruising trip into the innards of a CIA counter-terror unit, follows a string of successes which have... Read more... |
Album: Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway - City of GoldFriday, 21 July 2023
Some country music cosies up as close as possible to pop, in hopes of dragging more listeners in, smoothing away the raw backwoods feel. The most famed exemplar of this route is, of course, Taylor Swift, at least in her early career. Other country... Read more... |
