politics
Gilbert & George, 21st Century Pictures, Hayward Gallery review - brash, bright and not so beautiful
Sarah Kent
There was a time when Gilbert & George made provocative pictures that probed the body politic for sore points that others preferred to ignore. Trawling the streets of East London, where they’ve lived since the 1960s, the artist duo chronicled the poverty and squalor of their neighbourhood in large photographic panels that feature the angry, the debased and the destitute.Scrawled on decaying walls, the racist, sexist and homophobic slogans they recorded on their wanderings, create an atmosphere of dread – of impending and actual violence. The streets were mean and, especially as gay men, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Armageddon is here again, as Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years examines the minutes before a nuclear missile hits Chicago from multiple perspectives, finding no hope anywhere.Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) is our first witness, clocking on as normal in the White House Situation Room, where a missile launch at a febrile international moment is at first logged as inconsequential. When it sickeningly dips from orbit towards the US, Ferguson’s patrician cool exudes the comforting professionalism you’d wish for at the potential end of the world, till she calls her husband and Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Idris Elba has only just appeared as the British Prime Minister in the action comedy Heads of State (2025) – now he's portraying the American President in Kathryn Bigelow's tense political thriller A House of Dynamite.The White House Situation Room is on red alert, and Elba's President must avert a nuclear escalation. He runs through theoretical emergency scenarios with his staff at hand yet ultimately has to act alone by making the critical decision.That's the setup of Bigelow's film, which plays out like a triptych, with the imminent nuclear strike repeated three times from different Read more ...
Gary Naylor
An opening video montage presents us with a rogues' gallery of powerful men who have done bad things. Plenty of the usual suspects appear to stomach-churning effect, but no ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy, sentenced last week to five years in prison by the usually tolerant French. So the problem certainly hasn’t gone away with the Clintons, Weinsteins and they’re ilk. We all know the “power corrupts…” quote, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised and, maybe, we should be a little wary of vesting so much power in such men – that is, most men.Duke Vincentio, no stranger to sins of the flesh Read more ...
Claudia Bull
Joanna Pocock’s second full-length book, Greyhound, tells the story of a single journey made and remade. In 2006, after the death of her sister and several miscarriages, Pocock travelled 2,300 miles from Detroit to Los Angeles by bus. She replicates the trip seventeen years later, curious to see how the States have changed and hoping to catch sight of her former self: “A ragged person running away from loss.”Greyhound synthesises the two trips and represents a blend of aims and genres typical of Fitzcarraldo’s non-fiction list: part memoir, part reportage; a polemic on environmental vandalism Read more ...
James Saynor
Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room. Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
If she decided to run for election, Suranne Jones would probably stand a good chance of winning. The Chadderton-born actress and producer has been a driving figure in British television ever since she became known for playing Karen McDonald on Coronation Street (2000 and 2004). Her vigorous presence and fearless nature made her a force to be reckoned with right from the start.She was widely celebrated for her performance in Unforgiven (2009), written by Sally Wainwright, who would become a frequent collaborator. However, it was the combination of Jones's detective role in Scott & Read more ...
David Kettle
There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.Heck, a group in front of me were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Would Jamie Lloyd's mind-bending revival of Evita win through twice in four weeks, I wondered to myself, paraphrasing a Tim Rice lyric from his 1978 collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber?This is the first Lloyd Webber musical I ever saw in its original production on Broadway, which is to say the storied Hal Prince staging that brought Tonys to all concerned, including co-stars Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin.But could my visceral response at a press preview be equalled several weeks later once all involved had settled into their (too-short) run? As the show itself puts it in a different Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The first rule for brown people, says the main character – played by BAFTA-winner Adeel Akhtar – in this highly entertaining dramedy, is not to let white people know how badly non-whites treat each other. This provocative statement comes towards the end of Shaan Sahota’s debut, The Estate, and with hilarious irony it perfectly describes the main vibe of the family conflict at the heart of the play.Staged in the National Theatre’s Dorfman space, and one of the final productions programmed by former artistic director Rufus Norris, the play tells the story of a British Sikh politician whose Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A glamorous black woman sits in a Forties bar under a Vichy cop’s gaze, cigarette tilted at an angle, till two male companions join her in clandestine conversation. The woman is Suzanne Césaire (Zita Hanrot), an influential Martinican journalist and essayist on Surrealism, feminism, Négritude (Francophone black consciousness) and an anti-colonial philosophy honed to a dangerous edge by the Fascist-aligned authorities. More intriguingly for director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, following this feverishly productive period, Césaire never published another word.That conventional biopic scenario, with Read more ...