mon 09/12/2024

Los Angeles

Album: Declan McKenna - What Happened to the Beach?

Declan McKenna is that rare thing, a popular contemporary male British singer-songwriter whose work tends to avoid solipsism, relentlessly projected vulnerability, and general whining. He writes interesting songs about an array of subjects, some...

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FLIP!, Summerhall Edinburgh review - sassy, satirical parable

You can almost feel the energy blazing off the stage in this fast, furious and fiercely funny two-hander from writer Racheal Ofori and Newcastle-based Alphabetti Theatre. Don’t blink or you’ll miss a crucial plot twist, or a nifty swerve into new...

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Fool's Paradise review - unfunny stab at making fun of Hollywood

It must have looked like a funny idea on paper: a mute innocent stumbles into a Hollywood career, is mindlessly fêted by the industry and throws all its idiocies into stark relief. It’s an idea as old as the romances of Chretien de Troyes and...

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Album: ¿Téo? - Luna

A little remarked fact of modern music is just how lush the sound of modern R&B and adjacent music is. A decade ago, the relative harshness of trap beats and EDM synths seemed to dominate sonically, or on the more bohemian fringes...

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Henry Hoke: Open Throat review - if a lion could speak

I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.But the novel was so much more: an odd but...

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Fatal Attraction, Paramount+ review - Adrian Lyne's bunny-boiler blockbuster expanded onwards and outwards

Directed by Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction was the biggest-grossing film of 1987, and gave the world the term “bunny boiler”. Lyne isn’t aboard for Paramount’s new eight-part series, but the film’s screenwriter James Dearden is a major script...

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Marlowe review - Liam Neeson wearily treads those mean streets

Neil Jordan’s take on Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is the first since Bob Rafelson’s Poodle Springs (1998), itself a lone outlier after Michael Winner’s misbegotten The Big Sleep (1978). No one seems to have considered why, or what they might...

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Album: Miley Cyrus - Endless Summer Vacation

Being a few years more marinated in life than Miley Cyrus, it’s taken me a while to come around to her music. From the periphery, I’ve traversed the annoyance of small folk watching Hannah Montana and the "Hoedown Throwdown", to the bemused horror...

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Creed III review - boxing clever

This third Creed film outgrows Rocky, leaving Stallone’s bridging presence behind for a wholly renewed series. Starring again as Adonis Creed, the illegitimate son of Rocky’s late rival Apollo, Michael B. Williams’ directorial debut builds a richly...

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Marcel the Shell With Shoes On review - small fry with a big heart

Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a...

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Album: Skrillex - Quest for Fire

Ageing boppers may bristle at the idea of a dance album where the average track length is three minutes. Yet this, Sonny “Skrillex” Moore’s first solo album since his debut nine years ago, is the most groove-based thing he’s done. It’s certainly a...

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Marina Allen, Cafe Oto Review - east London substitutes for 1970s Los Angeles

When Marina Allen’s second album Centrifics came out last autumn, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter said her voice was the only instrument on the record. She writes on guitar and piano but beyond what she sang, everything else was played by...

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