New York
joe.muggs
Everything on this record changes shape. One moment in “RayCats” Far Eastern instrumentation is being glitched beyond recognition, then suddenly it sounds like something from a relaxation tape. “Same” shimmers and twists between 20th century avant-classical, Depeche Mode at their stadium peak and pure electronic sound. “The Station” sounds like Drake or Future crooning over the bassline from a 90s grunge track, but periodically dissolves into Autechre type abstraction.But that's Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, all over. Since he emerged from the US electronic noise scene, he's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add Catalan writer Jordi Galcerán to the shortlist of European playwrights who are finding an international perch, in this case with a tricksy four-character play that has had more than 200 productions in over 60 countries. The UK premiere of The Grönholm Method follows six years on from a Los Angeles staging that boasted the same director (Mike Nichols protégé BT McNicholl) and leading man (Jonathan Cake as the bilious Frank), while a 2007 Spanish movie, The Method, expanded the premise for the screen. Given all this activity and attention, it's moderately surprising Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812. His sentiments were decades later rather improbably set to the tune of a popular drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club, metamorphosing into the official American national anthem by Act of Congress in 1931 – you couldn’t make it up.That was just one of the unexpected facts in Waldemar Januszczak’s three-part foray into the special nature, as he sees it, of American art: as in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The band’s back together. Alfred Molina plays Rothko for the third time in Michael Grandage’s revisiting of John Logan’s richly textured two-hander, first seen at the Donmar in 2009 and then bypassing the West End for Broadway. Another excellent Alfred – Alfred Enoch, of the Harry Potter films and American TV series How to Get Away with Murder – succeeds Eddie Redmayne as Rothko’s assistant, forming a compelling duo in this 90-minute meditation on the nature, process and purpose of art.We’re in Rothko’s New York studio in the late 1950s, where he’s working on a major commission: grand murals Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels have been admired for their prose style, scathing wit and pitiless depiction of a rotting aristocracy. Benedict Cumberbatch claims that Hamlet and Melrose were the two roles he was desperate to play, and now (via his own production company SunnyMarch) his portrayal of Melrose lands on Sky Atlantic.Each of the five-part series will dramatise one of St Aubyn’s books. This opener, Bad News (actually the second book in the series) found our drug-addled, psychologically shattered and disdainfully posh anti-hero taking a trip to New York to bring back the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Writer Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall imagines modern America in the not-too-distant future. The date is 22nd November 2019 and following an attack on Times Square in which 17 people were killed, martial law has been imposed. Demands for illegal immigrants to be thrown out of the country have resulted in mass round ups and swollen detention centres. Hysteria stalks the country.We find ourselves in an interview room in El Paso prison, Texas. Rick (played by Trevor White) is a Trump-voting felon incarcerated in a surveilled solitary confinement cell. Gloria (played by Angela Griffin) is Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Shot in 2004 when photographer Robert Frank was 80 (main picture), this award-winning film was aired on The South Bank Show the following year, but is only now on release. I hope the experience was cathartic for Frank, because to the viewer it feels as if he is being put through the ringer. “Anything else the public needs to know?” he asks wearily as he sinks onto a divan, having exposed his soul to camera in elucidation of “how it feels to be here.”His patience is sorely tested when the camera runs out of film. Director Gerald Fox (notable for films on artists Gilbert & George, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Playing Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom on 8 September 1974, the New York Dolls opened their first set of the evening with three cover versions. Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man” was followed by The Shangri-Las’ “(Give Him a) Great Big Kiss” and Otis Redding’s “Don’t Mess With Cupid”. They were acknowledging that blues, girl group records and soul were integral to who they were. A pretty comprehensive sweep considering they were a prime influence on the purportedly reductive punk rock. Once the building blocks were revealed to the audience, Vancouver witnessed them lurching into their own " Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Back by feverishly popular demand, Jim Steinman’s mega-musical is no longer in danger of alarming unsuspecting opera-goers. A year on from its Coliseum debut, this indisputably bonkers show moves to the West End venue it was surely always destined for – that lingeringly inhabited by its rock operatic forebear. The Queen is dead; long live the Loaf.Unlike most jukebox musicals, this one originated as a theatrical concept back in the Seventies, then became an unlikely hit album instead. Unfortunately, that hasn’t blessed it with, say, a decent script, coherent plotting or satisfying Read more ...
Saskia Baron
What is it about Brian Selznick’s ornate illustrated fictions that leads good directors to make bad films? Turning The Invention of Hugo Cabret into Hugo was a near disaster for Scorsese, and now comes Todd Haynes’s stifling adaptation of Selznick’s novel, Wonderstruck.Two different narratives intertwine, one set in the 1970s, the other in the 1920s. Both centre on children battling with hearing loss who embark on a solo quest in New York searching for an absent parent. Eventually their lives overlap, but it takes forever to get there. At one point the Julianne Moore Read more ...
howard.male
This New York band’s first album for a decade is as good as anything else they’ve done, but what were they thinking with the track order? Things get off to an agreeable bouncy Blondie-esque start with first single “Pirates”. But after that there are several decidedly plodding, generic tracks before the party really gets started. Perhaps they have succumbed to the long-held received wisdom that only a dull four-to-the-floor beat will seduce the masses. But it’s always been their knack for combining novel polyrhythms with unusual chord progressions that’s made them one of my favourite 21st Read more ...