Los Angeles
Joseph Walsh
This year, Cannes has been adamantly defending traditional cinema, with more than a few jibes at Netflix (who remain persona non grata at the festival), but that hasn’t stopped them screening two episodes of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Amazon TV series, Too Old To Die Young. Refn has gone on record stating that his latest project is still cinema — a 13-hour film that shows all the verve and ambition you’d expect from the Danish auteur. If these two episodes are anything to go by, his argument is more than believable.Episodes four and five might seem an odd choice to screen at the world- 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 ...
Joe Muggs
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place. Her impossible precociousness (at 17, she's a superstar and has been in the public eye for four years) and voraciousness (her and her brother Finneas's writing swerves from torch songs to trap beats, far-out electronica to glam-goth) should by all rights be an annoying mess, but absorb this album like a hallucinatory gothic cabaret show and it all makes sense. The gender ambiguities and gallows humour make sense. Even the manic pixie dream girl filtered via Resident Evil persona makes sense. Dammit, even the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Disappointment is instant, anyway. David Robert Mitchell’s second film, It Follows, was a teenage horror tragedy of perfectly sustained emotion. His third, Under the Silver Lake, seems superficial and scattershot, a callow effort at a magnum opus, in which the former work’s feeling is replaced by pop culture riffs. Keep watching, though, and the superficiality at least has a point, and its lead actor, Andrew Garfield, makes its heart beat.Garfield’s Sam lives in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, resenting work and so unable to pay his rent. Binoculars to ogle his topless neighbour and phone- Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
Confessions first: I fell asleep mid-way through Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor, from too much time on trains and planes over the New Year. I was kindly allowed back for a second visit to the Finborough Theatre show, for a Sunday matinee, dosed with coffee and determined to concentrate fully. This was a good thing. The production's name attraction, Olivier Award-winner Sheila Atim, had previously seemed a minor part whereas her masterful performance (must one say mistressful these days?) as Rosa the stripper is a highlight of the piece. It was also a good thing because the plot of Time is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind 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 ...
Marina Vaizey
The master of the Southern California police procedural is back. In Dark Sacred Night Michael Connelly puts centre stage his oldest creation, the Vietnam veteran turned original, ethical policeman who marches to his own moralities, Hieronymous – aka known, natch, as Harry – Bosch, paired for the first time with his newest one, the resourceful Renée Ballard. Billed as the new “Bosch & Ballard tale”, it is the first novel in which they meet and work together, chapters alternating between the two.The pairing of loners is typical. Bosch’s overwhelming need, now that he is retired but working Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Mark Kidel has made a beautiful, ethereal film projecting his version of Cary Grant and as such it’s destined to be picked over by the actor’s legions of fans, each of whom will have a different version. But what would the man himself have thought if he’d lived to see Becoming Cary Grant? Notoriously protective and ambivalent about his image, one can only hope that he’d approve of the documentary's sympathetic, melancholic tone.One of the biggest stars in Hollywood’s golden age, Grant appeared in over 70 films before retiring at 62. Kidel makes generous and judicious use of scenes from his Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ex Mykah is a multi-instrumentalist and producer on the LA music scene who’s worked with the names such as Mark Ronson and Miike Snow. His own debut album sounds very far from either of those. Instead it comes from the warped, alt-hip hop end of the pop spectrum, while also recalling that brief Noughties blog flourish “chillwave” (the likes of Neon Indian and Washed Out). This is music dipped deep in a woozy, druggy feel, but which also never wanders far from an actual tune.Ex Mykah is Colombian-Cuban-American Bryan Senti who deeply resents the direction his country has taken and the PR Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Rod Stewart continues to hit the spot: he never fails to deliver well-crafted music that draws from the wide range of styles that he clearly loves. Apart from being a megastar and a lovable performer, he has always been a musician with a great deal of taste – as was clear at the very start with his two remarkable solo albums, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down (1969) and Gasoline Alley (1970).His latest is true to form, and ranges from smooth and danceable Philly Sound-inspired tracks such as “Give Me Love” to the gutsy country blues of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, originally a hit with black Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The idea of producing a classic play in a mix of two languages is pretty odd. What kind of audience is a bilingual version of Molière’s best-known comedy aiming at, you wonder. Homesick émigrés? British francophiles with rusty A-level French? Neither constituency is likely to be satisfied by this curious dish that is neither fish nor fowl.Paul Anderson, best known as Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders but now affecting a dodgy southern-states drawl, is Tartuffe, redrawn in Christopher Hampton’s adaptation as a new-age guru. Proclaiming the spiritual benefits of celibacy and poverty, he has Read more ...