California
Veronica Lee
You may have seen Desiree Burch, a Californian now living in London, on The Mash Report on BBC One. She's an engaging and energetic storyteller and Desiree's Coming Early, her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe show directed by Sarah Chew, is a fantastical tale about her visit to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, when she accidentally took LSD.But it's not just cheap laughs about expanding her mind, as Burch ruminates on race, men's sexual misbehaviour and identity. And, stepping aside from the stand-up every so often and reading from a lectern, she weaves in some interest facts about Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Deep from the heart of Trumpland comes Cuck, a deeply unpleasant film about a totally repellent character. Directed and co-written by Rob Lambert, the film opened simultaneously last autumn in the States with Joker, with which it shares an overlapping interest in societal outsiders pushed to the brink and beyond by their pathologies. Weirdly, too, both movies feature ailing mums who demand to be bathed by their emasculated, increasingly unhinged sons – parts taken by Frances Conroy in Joker and a take-no-prisoners Sally Kirkland this time out. (Onetime Oscar nominee Kirkland also gets a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Huey Lewis and the News were an unlikely mid-Eighties phenomenon. Their Sports album was a mega-success for a band already approaching early middle age. Their Fifties feel, given a contemporary polish and boosted by association with cinematic juggernaut Back to the Future, sat comfortably (yet incongruously) alongside the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran. They were, however, always shorthand for middle-of-the-road, their appeal satirized by Brett Easton Ellis who made them a favourite of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. It should, then, come as no surprise that their latest album is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The 92nd Academy Awards saved its surprises for a final stretch that saw Parasite make history as the first foreign language film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, pipping to the post the presumptive favourite, the World War One drama 1917 (pictured below). The top prize marked the fourth Oscar of the night for the South Korean success story, following a no less startling director trophy for Bong Joon Ho over 1917’s heavily favoured Sam Mendes, as well as prizes for best original screenplay and best international film.“I will drink until next morning,” Bong remarked to an adoring crowd Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dennis Hopper’s first starring role, in Night Tide from 1961, as a naïve but curious young sailor bewitched by a siren, offers a strange mirror to his role as the evil Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). If anything, he offers a preview of the bemused Jeffrey Beaumont played by Kyle McLachlan in Lynch's masterpiece. Curtis Harrington made dark and wonderful work as an independent film maker, not least in Night Tide, now released in a 4K version, along with a very well-curated collection of eight of his short films, many of them as interesting in their own way as the more Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
While recent motor racing movies have been built around superstar names like Ayrton Senna and James Hunt, the protagonists of Le Mans ’66 (shown at London Film Festival) will be barely recognisable to a wider audience. They are Carroll Shelby, the former American racing driver turned car designer, and Ken Miles, a British driver transplanted to American sports car racing. In a bid for some all-American racing prestige, their task was to help the Ford Motor Company to beat Ferrari at the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1966.In James Mangold’s film (with a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth Read more ...
joe.muggs
Don't let the presence of nerds' favourite Madlib on production duties fool you: this is a big bad bastard of a West Coast rap record. It's a cocaine-wholesaling, n-wording, gun-toting, dog-eat-dog-ing, murderous bastard of a rap record, in fact. The narratives are of jail cells, money laundering, betrayal and domination. When talk turns to politics, it's couched in terms of brutal power, paranoia and “puppetmasters”. Madlib's music is constantly oppressive, its crushing bass and dense mesh of samples and found sounds surrounding you like the most potent narcotic smoke, every detail painfully Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of Sky Atlantic's Big Little Lies paraded across our screens in 2017, its shocking but satisfying ending looked like the perfect conclusion to a superb self-contained drama. Doh! Of course it wasn’t – it was just the first season out of who knows how many.The curse of television’s addiction to squeezing the juice out of any successful show, incarcerating the viewer in a perpetual twilight of provisional pseudo-endings, has been discussed elsewhere, but short of passing a law against it or holding a referendum on each individual case, it’s hard to see it going away. But Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's five years since Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus released an album, and it's not entirely clear how far he's moved creatively. To be fair he's been busy branching out in other directions, producing for superstar rapper Kendrick Lamar, making short films, and helping members of his Brainfeeder stable like Thundercat and Kamasi Washington along to greater fame. But with this album he seems to have taken up precisely where 2014's “Your Dead” left off. The same preoccupations are here: exquisite musicianship mashed together with deliberate decay and destruction, high falutin spiritual Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Recently, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder have found themselves in a career renaissance. Reeves has made a remarkable comeback as the dog-loving action-hero John Wick, while Ryder won audiences over as the grief-stricken mother, Joyce Byers, in Netflix’s 80s nostalgia-fest Stranger Things.The prospect of the duo being reunited following their past on-screen appearances in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Scanner Darkly and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is more than enough to trigger audience interest. After all, for a time they were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood, who wouldn’t want to see them Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The tortuous road to addiction and back again – or maybe not – makes for a faintly tedious experience in Beautiful Boy, notwithstanding the committed performances of an A-list cast. On the road to his second consecutive Oscar nomination following his breakout performance last year in Call Me By Your Name, Timothée Chalamet confirms a degree of sensitivity rare in actors of any age, and Steve Carell finds numerous ways to furrow his brow even when the film as a whole leaves you checking your watch. Based, unusually, on a pair of memoirs by a father and son, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his breakthrough 2010 Good Thingsalbum or commercial (co-writing and singing the late Swedish EDM gigastar Aviicii's “Wake Me Up” can't have done his bank balance any harm, what with going to number one in 22 countries). And of course nobody ever went bankrupt releasing a Christmas album... And yet, extraordinarily, he has always avoided having any Read more ...