America
Tim Cumming
Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14 CDs covering five full concerts from November and December 1975, as well as rehearsals and sundry soundboard cuts from other shows. Casual fans may be content with the excellent 2 CD Rolling Thunder set issued back in the Noughties; collectors, however, will be clearing shelf room to set it alongside the rest of an increasingly cyclopean Bootleg Series. The rehearsals, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s hard, and finally fruitless to attempt to describe Okwui Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic in conventional terms of genre: combining elements of dance and theatre, this visceral solo performance transcends both. It engages with frantic movement at the same time as nursing a text – an utterance, rather than a narrative – that attains a fervid urgency, a state that demands immersion from the viewer. The concentrated effort of its 80-minute run clearly takes a huge amount out of the Nigerian-American actor-writer: it’s hard to call her just a performer, this is an experience that she lives.Her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Eating Animals begins as a David and Goliath tale of independent farmers versus industrial farming. Frank Reese specialises in rare-breed turkeys and chickens. He calls his farm the "Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch" because, for him, his traditional way of farming is akin to a religious experience. And when asked which of his birds matters most, the thought of having to choose almost reduces him to tears.Paul Willis has a similarly passionate commitment to the pigs roaming freely on his ranch; his pork is delicious, but while he sends 3,000 pigs a week for slaughter, a factory farm can produce 4, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Get me rewrite!”: That’s likely to be a common reaction to Late Night, the well-meaning but surprisingly slipshod star vehicle for Emma Thompson set in and among the writing world of a New York late-night chat show that is hitting the skids. Thompson brings a peppery command (and some seriously stylish hair) to the role of Katherine Newbury, a disdainful small-screen personality who refers to her writing staff not by their names but by numbers.And yet time and again, Mindy Kaling’s script seems itself in need of doctoring from one of Katherine’s put-upon scribes. You applaud the film’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Gloria (2013), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Disobedience (2018), Chile’s Sebastián Lelio has earned a deserved reputation as a sympathetic director of women. It may seem a strange move for him to remake Gloria only a few years after the Spanish-language original, but Lelio claims he was inspired to do it by a meeting with Julianne Moore, who said she’d do it if he would direct.The action has been transplanted to Los Angeles from Santiago, with both the English script and many of the camera shots closely following the 2013 version. It’s the story of a 50-something divorcée determined to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sun, snow, and some unadorned silliness danced to the music of Björk: no one can accuse San Francisco of casting an insufficiently wide tonal (or climatic) net in this second of four programmes on view from San Francisco Ballet as part of their Sadler's Wells season (continuing to June 8). Having largely thrilled to their all-Shostakovich opener, I found this line-up more of a literally mixed bag. And yet, just when the sobriety of Cathy Marston's take on the American novel Ethan Frome is beginning to pall, along comes the tinsel-infused, take-no-prisoners kitsch of Arthur Pita's Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A chronic recycler, Dennis Potter fashioned five feature films from his earlier TV dramas and another from one of his novels. The best of them are 1985’s Dreamchild (from the BBC's Alice, 1965) and Track 29 (1987), which he adapted from the BBC's Schmoedipus (1974). The latter was one of Potter’s "visitation" plays, in which frustrated or guilty protagonists conjur into existence an angel – or the devil, in the case of Brimstone and Treacle (banned in 1976, remade in 1982) – to commit an act of liberating violence.As in Schmoedipus (which starred Anna Cropper and an inspired Tim Curry), Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The huge achievement of the last two decades of August Wilson’s life, right up to his death in 2005, was his “American Century Cycle”, in which he charted the African American experience over that time frame decade by decade, its action set largely in the downtown Hill District of Pittsburgh where the playwright grew up.Premiered in 1999, King Hedley II represents the Eighties – the front curtain makes much of it being the beginning of the Reagan years – though Wilson’s concerns go far beyond standard documentary. History in this black neighbourhood extends back a long way, something that Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Outside the Palladium a couple of months back for Joan Baez’s farewell, I was given a flyer for this album – by Naomi Bedford herself it turns out. We had a brief chat which left me with a good feeling about the project and I was disappointed to see I’d be away for the London concert marking the launch of Singing It All Back Home: Appalachian Ballads of English and Scottish Origin. My intuition was correct for this, the third outing from Bedford and Simmonds and a talented group of confrères, among them Ben Walker on banjo, Rhys Lovell on bass and Ben Paley (son of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a painful and poignant study of character-disintegration, and a triumph for its writer, director and star Jim Cummings. He plays small-town police officer Jim Arnaud, a man trying to do his best while a rising sea of troubles threatens to drown him.Thunder Road is based on Cummings’s original 12-minute film, which won him the Short Film Grand Jury prize at the 2016 Sundance Festival. This provides the material for the opening scene, a daringly extended single shot in which Jim delivers the eulogy at his mother’s funeral. Despite looking pressed and formal in his police uniform, inside Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small-scale Off Broadway venture late in 2009, The Starry Messenger has arrived in London to mark the belated British stage debut of Matthew Broderick, the movie name much-loved on the New York stage. Reuniting the two-time Tony-winner with his lifelong chum Kenneth Lonergan, who since this play's premiere has become an A-list Oscar-winner, Sam Yates's production is equal parts intriguing and irritating, and Broderick's singular theatrical deadpan may alienate as many people as it attracts. It may not help this play's cause that Lonergan has been represented in successive Broadway Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The release of Booksmart is perfectly scheduled for half term, this high school buddy comedy is guaranteed to tempt youngsters away from their exam revision. It’s fast and funny and packed with squirm-inducing sex gags and a peppy soundtrack. Its heroes are Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Deaver), the class swots who forswore all extra-curricular fun in order to study hard and get into top universities. They are the teens who got fake ID not to go drinking underage but to use the 24-hour library. Molly corrects the punctuation on the graffiti in the toilets Read more ...