Los Angeles
'Daddy' A Melodrama, Almeida Theatre review - production exuberance carries a new play of promiseMonday, 11 April 2022
Danya Taymor’s production of “Daddy” A Melodrama has a huge exuberance: a tour de force in itself, it's also a scintillating introduction to the work of Jeremy O Harris. The young American dramatist earned considerable attention, and acclaim for the... Read more... |
Oscars 2022 - the smack heard around the worldMonday, 28 March 2022
What the [expletive deleted]?That’s a viewer’s only logical response to the 94th Academy Awards, which was trudging along predictably and fairly aimlessly until such time as Chris Rock took to the stage in the closing hour and events took a dramatic... Read more... |
Ambulance review – Michael Bay in excelsisSunday, 27 March 2022
Speed in an ambulance? Gone In 60 Seconds meets Heat? Reports that Michael Bay’s lockdown-shot LA film would be an intimate, “character-based” drama don’t survive contact with the director’s high-concept, high-velocity MO. If anything, working... Read more... |
Pam & Tommy, Disney+ review - the infamous sex tape that went globalWednesday, 02 February 2022
The transformation of Lily James, demure star of Yesterday, Cinderella and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, into smokin’ beach babe Pamela Anderson is the most memorable thing about Disney+'s uneven eight-part drama. At its core is... Read more... |
Album: Finneas - OptimistThursday, 14 October 2021
This record is a heck of a metatextual experience to listen to. In releasing his debut album, 24 year old Finneas O’Connell is attempting to step out of the shadow of one of the biggest pop cultural behemoths of our time – his own sister,... Read more... |
Album: Lindsey Buckingham - Lindsey BuckinghamWednesday, 22 September 2021
Lindsey Buckingham was last in and first out of Fleetwood Mac’s classic line-up (quitting in 1987, and forced out by long ago ex- Steve Nicks in 2018). He was a would-be Brian Wilson in their midst, an unlooked for, maverick auteur whose first hit “... Read more... |
Album: Willow - Lately I Feel EverythingMonday, 26 July 2021
Willow Smith has done more during her life than the average 20-year-old. The daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, she bounced off her childhood appearance in her father’s film I Am Legend to a No 2 UK hit with “Whip My Hair” a decade ago,... Read more... |
Album: Peyton - PSAWednesday, 21 July 2021
For 25 years now, LA label Stones Throw records has become one of the most reliable brands in music. It began with, and has always been associated with, the leftfield hip hop of founder George “Peanut Butter Wolf” Manak, and regular contributors... Read more... |
Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardomSunday, 28 February 2021
The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family. But the club-gigs-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Visual AcousticsTuesday, 29 December 2020
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of... Read more... |
Album: The Struts - Strange DaysThursday, 15 October 2020
Making sourdough, PE with Joe Wicks, writing a novel… none of that for Derby’s finest purveyors of unapologetically retro rock. Instead, the Struts decided to make the most of lockdown by recording a new album – all piling into producer Jon Levine’s... Read more... |
Kajillionaire review - quirks, strangeness and charm from Miranda JulyFriday, 09 October 2020
Old Dolio, the oddly named central character played, wonderfully, by Evan Rachel Wood in Miranda July’s third feature film, learned to forge signatures before she could write. “In fact that’s how she learned to write,” says her father Robert (the... Read more... |
