America
Nick Hasted
Amsterdam is a multi-faceted anti-fascist shaggy dog story, like Jules et Jim scripted by an off-form Thomas Pynchon. Though it falters in many major ways, David O. Russell’s not especially funny, tense or well-acted spiritual sequel to American Hustle is carried by an enviable cast and benign, off-kilter charm.It's 1933, and Bert (Christian Bale) is a Catholic-Jewish doctor with a glass eye helping fellow traumatised Great War veterans in New York. His veteran best friend, lawyer Harold (John David Washington), asks him to autopsy their beloved commanding officer, whose daughter (Taylor Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter and showrunner Steven Moffat is renowned for some of his work, especially Sherlock, but other stuff not so much (I direct you towards Dracula or The Time Traveler’s Wife). When the history is written, Inside Man is liable to languish at the dog’s-breakfast end of the Moffat canon.There used to be a TV cooking show where contestants had to somehow create a meal from a random batch of ingredients they found in the fridge – a pineapple, a pork chop, a crumpet and a jar of mayonnaise, perhaps. Inside Man (BBC One) looked as if it was similarly devised as a kind of brain-teaser. How Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Unless you’re one of the infamous 1%, you might be forgiven for recently spending a bit of time searching for a booster to reinvigorate your mojo before a seriously difficult winter kicks in. Well, assuming that your electricity supply hasn’t already been cut off by profiteering greed heads, the Bobby Lees’ new album might just do the trick.There’s nothing like raucous and fiery rock’n’roll to replenish your soul and the Bobby Lees have enough of that for it to be prescribed by the NHS. In fact, kicking off with its raucous title track indicates just how Bellevue is going to go and it’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an atrocity – a ghoulish biopic of Marilyn Monroe that luxuriates in her maltreatment and misery, culminating in protracted images of the star’s lonely death from barbiturate pills distractedly swallowed like candies and washed down with Scotch in her Los Angeles bungalow.Ana de Armas’s expressions too often make Monroe a rabbit in the headlights, but that’s writer-director Dominik's fault. Whether the movie’s Monroe is on or off camera, De Armas speaks with that breathy undulating voice of incredulity Monroe impersonators use, but her real voice was softer and more Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can a play peak too soon? That's the quandary that attends the Old Vic airing of Eureka Day, Jonathan Spector's on-point if overextended comedy that was written prior to the pandemic but has absolutely come into its own just now. A skewering of liberal pieties that puts one in mind of a fellow theatrical satirist like Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park), Eureka Day takes few prisoners on the way to a flat-seeming ending.But Katy Rudd's production, featuring Helen Hunt (pictured below) in a notably unstarry London stage debut, is lucky enough before that to have sent the audience into the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
When Sidney Poitier died in January at the age of 94, the obituaries were warm and respectful to the pioneering black movie star. Now comes Oprah Winfrey’s nearly two-hour tribute, complete with famous interviewees, some great movie clips, and intriguing archival material. It’s a little on the adoring side (producer Winfrey cries on camera), but director Reginald Hudlin does an excellent job at covering the ups and occasional downs of Poitier’s long and fascinating career. His parents were poor farmers in the Bahamas. Poitier recounts how he was born two months prematurely and not Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Across the pond Winslow Homer is a household name; in his day, he was regarded as the greatest living American painter. He was renowned especially for his seascapes and his most famous painting, The Gulf Stream, 1899/1906 (main picture) features in the National Gallery’s retrospective.A small boat with a broken mast bobs about on stormy waters, at the mercy of the waves. Clinging to the deck is a lone sailor, a black man desperately scanning the horizon for help. He needs it; the sail lies in a useless heap and nothing else is on board beside a few sugarcanes. As if to emphasise the extremity Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A tender love story has arrived at the Kings Head theatre from the US, where its author, Tanya Barfield, is an award-winning playwright for both television and theatre. The plot is simple: two women — one white, one Black — meet in an office where one is a supervisor, the other a science teacher turned temp, and their lives become entwined over the next 25 years.But Barfield mixes things up by structuring the narrative like a jigsaw puzzle. The audience then has to put all the pieces together.The structuring device guarantees a degree of pathos — there’s a poignancy in learning a relationship Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Shortly after the art teacher who thinks he’s a genius jumps on a table naked to be sketched, only to meet a sticky end, high school senior Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) sets out to start his brilliant career as an underground cartoonist.From this bedrock of delusional artistic struggle, grotesquerie and hurt, Safdies associate Owen Kline’s debut carves a queasy slice of observational tragicomedy.His milieu is a highly personal comics subculture barely seen in cinema since Crumb, where the likes of Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes (Ghost World) paralleled grunge’s breakthrough by chronicling self- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life skeleton of How Do You Burn?, it mostly shows love for the rock form itself, and the life it traditionally offered. The ghosts of the Nineties, when the Whigs bloomed and American rock last defined an era, haunt this record. So too the Seventies, when the Stones dropped clues to an apparently seedily splendid existence through albums of implicit Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Queen of Glory is a passion project, nurtured for almost 10 years as a script by Nana Mensah, who ended up not only directing the film but taking the lead role as well in order to get it made.It’s the story of Sarah Obeng, an ambitious second-generation Ghanaian teaching at Columbia University. Her plan to move to Illinois with her lover and finish her PhD in oncology is derailed when her mother dies unexpectedly and leaves Sarah as the owner of a bookstore in the Bronx.Filmed in Mensah’s parents’ actual Christian bookstore on Sundays – the only day it was closed – and on local Read more ...