America
Blu-ray: Columbia Noir #3Wednesday, 12 May 2021
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the... Read more... |
Album: St Vincent - Daddy's HomeTuesday, 11 May 2021
From her indie roots to the Grammy-winning angular art-rock of her self-titled 2014 album and the new wave glam of MASSEDUCTION, St Vincent has refused to allow her work to be pigeonholed. Her latest pivot draws from the grit and glamour of early... Read more... |
Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation review - genius dogged by disappointmentSaturday, 01 May 2021
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with... Read more... |
Album: Sufjan Stevens - ConvocationsSaturday, 01 May 2021
Sufjan Stevens is not only prolific, multi-talented and wide-ranging in his experimentation, but he never fails to make interesting work. He’s undoubtedly one of the giants of American contemporary music. His originality and creative risk-taking... Read more... |
Mare of Easttown, Sky Atlantic review - Kate Winslet shines in finely-drawn Pennsylvania mysteryTuesday, 20 April 2021
Read our review of the season finale hereDark family dramas set in unglamorous, unprosperous communities in the north-east of the USA have become a genre unto themselves. One thinks here of the work of writers such as Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Straight Shooting / Hell BentTuesday, 20 April 2021
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to... Read more... |
Promising Young Woman, Sky Cinema review - Emerald Fennell's brilliant directorial debutMonday, 19 April 2021
After winning a couple of Baftas, and with five nominations at next week’s Oscars, Promising Young Woman comes surging in on the crest of a wave. Emerald Fennell, already known for acting roles in The Crown and Call the Midwife and for showrunning... Read more... |
Album: Lady Dan - I Am the ProphetMonday, 12 April 2021
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the... Read more... |
Sound of Metal review - hidden depths behind the decibelsThursday, 08 April 2021
I once went to see Motorhead, back in the days when real men didn’t wear earplugs, and afterwards it was if somebody had completely sawn off the top half of my hearing register. Weird and scary, and the band were putting themselves through that... Read more... |
Extract: TV by Susan BordoTuesday, 30 March 2021
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes... Read more... |
Album: Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over the Country ClubFriday, 19 March 2021
Lana Del Rey has turned pop’s volume down, returning hushed intimacy to the music’s heart. Her collaborator Jack Antonoff was also heavily involved in Taylor Swift’s Folklore reinvention, but Del Rey’s idea of Americana remains very different. Its... Read more... |
Minari review - a Korean family searches for the American dreamThursday, 18 March 2021
“David, don’t run,” is the refrain that runs through the first scenes of Lee Isaac Chung’s affecting, autobiographical Minari, acclaimed at Sundance, winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film (it’s mainly in Korean) and nominated for... Read more... |
