America
Markie Robson-Scott
Writer Ariel (Ayo Edebiri; The Bear) has worked at a music magazine for three years but in spite of coming up with great ideas, she never gets assigned stories.“You’re middle as fuck,” says her boyfriend, by way of explanation, as they eat Japanese food together in New York. She’s only 27, not interesting or experienced enough to land the big interviews. And her lazy editor Stan (Murray Bartlett) just takes advantage of her fine research.Nothing terribly unusual about that, perhaps, but it’s the only premise that makes sense in director Mark Anthony Green’s debut feature. He worked for years Read more ...
John Carvill
Director Haroula Rose’s gentle, good-hearted new comedy-drama All Happy Families takes its title from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”There’s no discernible attempt on Rose's part to map her characters onto Tolstoy’s, but if we were to identify a potential analogue for Konstantin Levin, the moral centre of Anna Karenina, it would be Graham (Josh Radnor). A decent, introspective, socially awkward would-be actor and screenwriter, Graham inhabits the upper floor of his childhood home Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film about African-American writer James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement not only put the Haitian-born Peck on the map as a director, but also made him one of the defining figures of contemporary black cinema.Since his debut Haitian Corner (1990), Peck has devoted himself to political topics, switching effortlessly between documentary or feature films to achieve a stronger factual or emotional impact. His work, he says, only serves one purpose: "I need to find a narrative, something that lasts and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I come to this album from a week or so spent among the denizens of the New York and Boston folk revivals, including a key figure from Tulsa and the Guthrie Center, and a concert (Judy Collins, marking 85 years of music and activism).They were a reminder (if one were needed) of how much the music of Woody Guthrie, his children and grandchildren, still means in a country heading back at full throttle to one that Woody and his confrères would recognise all too easily: one of poverty and prejudice and life-altering climate change. But this time around there is no FDR, no New Deal, and right now Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Adrien Brody is on a roll. Following his Golden Globe and BAFTA Best Actor wins for his performance as László Toth in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, Brody picked up the equivalent Oscar last Sunday, celebrating it by giving the longest speech in Academy Awards history. Two days later, he was nominated for an Olivier for his portrayal of the real-life death-row inmate Nick Yarris in The Fear of 13, Lindsey Ferrentino's play at the Donmar having marked the 51-year-old actor’s British stage debut.The Oscar was Brody’s second. In 2003, he became the youngest winner in the Best Actor category for Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was uniquely disturbing, with its monster Leatherface’s first primal eruption to hang a victim on a meat-hook rivalling Psycho’s murders for shock and fright. It was only as the bludgeoning effect faded on subsequent viewings that the film’s pitch-black comedy became clear.With a ferocious singularity of mood and purpose bred by its micro-budget, hothouse shoot, it cast a Citizen Kane-like shadow over Hooper’s subsequent career, despite the landmark TV scares of Salem’s Lot (1979) and the smash-hit Poltergeist (1982), which now seems a true Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Forty years ago, Chuck Prophet was the Keith Richards-like guitar hotshot in Green On Red, peers of R.E.M. and among the raw country-punk architects of what became Americana. Now he’s 61 and playing in a sold-out pub back-room in Hassocks, a downland commuter village near Brighton, still giving his all during two hours of humour and humane passion as if this is the biggest stage, and this crowd a community clearly worth serving.Green On Red proved to be a youthful waystation of high times and burnout, on the road to a greater career spent reinvigorating rock’n’roll’s essential language with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is a dancer. She’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle, an outdated Las Vegas show that’s full of “breasts, rhinestones and joy”, in her words, for 30 years. And now it’s closing. Where can she go, at the age of 57?The third feature film from director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis Ford, niece of Sofia; Palo Alto, Mainstream) is an homage to those who struggle to make a living as Vegas show-girls and casino waitresses. The locations, with their desolate flyovers, freeways and neon glitz are atmospheric, but Kate Gersten's script doesn't light up the lives of these girls Read more ...
Sarah Kent
On walking into Mikalene Thomas’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery my first reaction was “get me out of here”. To someone brought up on the paired down, less-is-more aesthetic of minimalism her giant, rhinestone-encrusted portraits are like a kick in the solar plexus – much too big and bright to stomach. Could I be expected to even consider accepting these gaudy monstrosities as art?A brash assault on the senses, they seemed to be daring me to turn away. Then came two installations – recreations of the living room in the terraced house in Camden, New Jersey where the artist grew up in the Read more ...
John Carvill
Rehab people will tell you there are three stages to drug abuse: fun; fun with problems; problems. There’s also a fourth phase, where there aren't any problems, because you’re dead.Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy maps out the territory between stages two and four. Bob (Matt Dillon) and his girlfriend Dianne (Kelly Lynch) lead Rick (James LeGros) and his girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham) in a gang of chronic narcotics addicts robbing pharmacies around Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest in order to stay one step ahead of withdrawal. Timewise, the film is hard to pin Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A year ago, after a deeply disappointing Manon Lescaut at Hackney Empire, I wrote here that English Touring Opera had often excelled in the past, and would do so again. The company hasn’t taken long to prove the point.Severe critics might argue that Eloise Lally’s New York mafia production of Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues too much resembles Jonathan Miller’s iconic wise-guy Rigoletto; that the now-obligatory feminist twist on the star-crossed lovers’ fate can at times feel heavy-handed; or simply that some of Bellini’s stratospheric top notes and sinuous melodic lines don’t quite Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” combined his observation of scary streetcorner wind-up toy monkeys with the bad luck charm of WW Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), in a story really about protagonist Hal’s fraught family Read more ...